5 Reasons Tumblr Doesn't Have Me Hooked Yet

This month I finally started using Tumblr in order to track my New Year's resolution of being more creative in 2011. At first I wasn't sure whether I should track my progress with a WordPress blog, a YouTube vlog, through tweets alone or with some other method, but I knew a lot of my friends were using Tumblr and I'd heard good things so I thought I'd give it a try. But a little over a week later I've got to say that I'm not entirely hooked, and I've got a few qualms with the service. I've put together a list of five of the biggest issues I have with Tumblr thus far. Read on and let me know if you agree. Before I get into my list of qualms I'd just like to say that I am not giving up on Tumblr entirely. There are a lot of things I really like about it and the enthusiasm of many of my friends using the service inspires me to keep at it. Our editor here at Social Times, Neil Vidyarthi, has written a number of posts about why Tumblr is great for meeting new friends, and why Twitter users should switch to Tumblr. I'm sure that in time I will grow to love the service just as much. After all, it took a little while for me to get the hang of and grow to love Twitter, WordPress and even Facebook. So I'm not writing off Tumblr entirely. That being said, I still believe that Tumblr could stand to make a few changes and improvements: The Interface Is Anything But Intuitive Generally I think I'm a pretty web savvy individual, but for some reason Tumblr's interface is completely lost on me. Somehow, in my first half an hour I managed to accidentally delete my blog twice and click my way into some bug that resulted in Tumblr having to delete my blog as well, after I had rewritten all my lost posts. (On a more positive note, the situation revealed to me that Tumblr does have excellent customer service. They responded to me immediately, gave me a couple of options and were able to delete my blog so I could start fresh within a matter of minutes.) Aside from the accidental (and intentional) deletings, I just seem to be having a hard time figuring out how certain things work and why. For instance, if you can upload a photo from your computer when you click to post a "Photo" then why can't you upload a photo when you click to post "Text"? You can use pictures in a text post, but they have to come from a link elsewhere on the Internet, not from your computer. I'm also confused by the whole 'Messages' area of the site. For starters, I can't really figure out how to send messages to other people and when someone sent me a message and I replied I accidentally posted her message, as well as my reply, to my Tumblr blog. Thanks to this mistake I won't make the same mistake in the future, but I'd rather not have to learn through trial and error. Basically, all I'm asking is for a little more clarity and intuitiveness when it comes to the Tumblr interface. I'm sure I'll get the hang of things pretty quickly, but the journey to getting the hang of things sure is frustrating... I Want Comments! The lack of commenting is probably my biggest problem with Tumblr. It's all well and good that I can like and reblog people's posts, but what am I supposed to do if I want to write a comment on something? Send the person a message? Unfortunately I haven't been able to figure out how to send messages yet. I understand that it's possible to add commenting to your Tumblr blog using Disqus. But should I really have to enable commenting on Tumblr with a different service? Why can't they just provide users with the ability to comment on each other's posts like you can write comments in WordPress and Blogger, on YouTube videos, Flickr pictures and even on Facebook? It's Hard To Find Your Friends I've grown used to websites and social networks that allow you to find your friends that are using the service via your Facebook, Gmail or Yahoo account. It's nice when you can just provide the site with your email address and password and they give you a list of all the people you know who are on the site and you can follow or friend the people you want to follow or friend. I know that a lot of my friends are on Tumblr. Over the last year or so I've seen them post their Tumblr posts on Twitter and Facebook. However, I didn't have a Tumblr of my own at the time so I didn't really take note or follow them. Now that I've got my own Tumblr I'd like to find all my friends and follow them, but it doesn't look like Tumblr has a bulk follow option. Tumblr lets you search for people to follow based upon URL, username or email address. However, you still have to rack your brain to remember all of your friends who have a Tumblr. I want a fast, easy way to find and follow them all! Downtime I am new to Tumblr so I missed the great Tumblr outage of 2010 but I spend enough time on Twitter to see all the complaints about Tumblr being down. Statistics show that Tumblr blogs were down for an average of 47.5 hours each during the period of October 15 to December 15 and, if you ask me, that is definitely not a desirable quality in a blogging service. I'm sure Tumblr has taken actions in order to prevent a mass outage on this scale from happening again. However, I already experienced a short downtime with my own Tumblr blog and I've only been using the service for a week. Analytics Would Be Nice Finally, while I think it's great that you can see how many people have liked and reblogged your posts it would be nice if Tumblr provided additional analytics. I'd like to know how many people are viewing my posts as well as where they are coming from. This is one of the things that I love about WordPress - even if you aren't using Google Analytics on your site you can still find good information about the number of viewers, top posts, searches and links that led to your posts and more using WordPress stats. I think something like that would add a lot of value to Tumblr as well. All this being said, I understand that Tumblr is a microblogging service and is designed as more of a place to "tumble" together all your favorite online content, videos, pictures, chat, quotes and more, rather than as a place to host a professional blogging site, and it really is a great place for collecting and sharing your favorite content in one place. However, I still think that some of the changed I've mentioned above would make Tumblr an even better, more effective and popular site. Do you have anything you'd like to see changed or improved about Tumblr?

Social Pro Daily

5 Reasons Tumblr Doesn't Have Me Hooked Yet

I finally started using Tumblr last week and I've got to say that I'm not entirely hooked. I've put together a list of five of the biggest issues I have with Tumblr thus far. Do you agree?

Megan O'Neill

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Megan O'Neill