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Every morning, David Karp walks past his beloved Vespa (scooter scooter) as he read in Inc. Magazine, putting on his helmet and heading to the office. Before 10, he stepped into his open-plan office, sitting in the middle, sitting on the side of the site running engineers, and on the other side was a member of the community outreach team - who was responsible for communicating and communicating with users. Kapp quietly sitting in front of their computer check the mail, and then open his Action Method dot matrix notebook, pick up a Pilot Precise pen, because of fear of memory is not good enough, or meeting too excited to say too much, he is in the book Write down or draw your own thoughts.

At the beginning of the meeting, employees in the office came to the conference room with only chairs and couches but no tables. Kapu often came with tea rather than coffee and they held weekly discussions there - Tumblr What to do next

On June 15, the data excavated by Mashable, a technology blogger in the United States, tells us that the 4-year-old light blogger Tumblr goes beyond the 8-year-old blog with platform WordPress and as of that day Tumblr had a total of 20,871,320 registered blogs, more than WordPress 85,000. This is an explosive growth as the figure was only about 7 million in January of this year. This exponential growth probably means there are still many records waiting to be broken and everything is just beginning.

Cap is 24 years old this year. At age 11 he taught himself how to write code; at age 15 he dropped out of high school; a year later he worked as a CTO at UrbanBaby, the upbringing site in New York; and five years ago he started preparing for "Light Blog" Tumblr. His original idea was simple: "I do not think blogs are suitable for most people because not everyone has a long story or a complete storytelling needs, but not all of them are suitable for micro-blogs, because some people need occasional more Speaking a few words, especially the information exchange is more and more media, people always want to be able to paste two pictures, or add a song.

As a result, Tumblr has become a platform for personal content publishing over Twitter and lighter than Blog, with a new name, Light Blogging.

Tumblr not only supports text, images, audio, video, unlimited text length, unlimited number of pictures, and even supports html, much more abundant than the text-publishing function limited to 140 words in Twitter. But its release is simple and does not require complicated operations like blogging on WordPress. It is easy to update and add content, users can even send content by email, other things will be automatically for you, the threshold is very low. These just-in-time features bring 20,000 new content to Tumblr every minute.

In a recent interview, singer John Mayer called Twitter "Done." He later clarified this on his Tumblr home page, explaining: "Twitter does not end, but I do not need it." Mel feels that the 140 characters on Twitter can cause information overload. And "finding a stranger's opinion of you in 140 characters is a bit like a mathematical equation with unknown X. Who are you, a stranger?"

Then, Mel praised Tumblr: "Tumblr is the future of social networking sites." He likes to read the user's responses because there is depth in the replies, "if the replies are not deep, then the respondent's blog's IPRs will devalue, The value of intellectual property is a commodity on Tumblr. "

Upon hearing about the incident, Kapp immediately responded through her own Tumblr: "I've been unable to describe language in three years to believe in this philosophy - and that's why Tumblr will never provide an old comment system - perfect. I love you, John.

In a previously interviewed interview, Cappe said: "Twitter and Facebook have apparently reduced their barriers to information disclosure, but they lack a strong system to express their identities." In his opinion, they are not built for creative expression and no one is going to give them I'm proud to be on Facebook. Instead, Tumblr is the platform for creating a proud online home.

"The Tumblr culture is strongly based on the Memcit culture, with the web-based far-reaching spread of fashion, photography and popular culture," commented Dan Goodswin, blogger of the well-known blog TotalFilm. Meme, a popular, genetically duplicated Internet cultural gene with anonymous authors and a lower entertaining profile.

It's not hard to see that Tumblr brings together more bloggers who focus on intellectual property such as designers, architects, craftspeople and celebrities with strong personal identities, such as Lady Gaga; and from the perspective of topic activity, The highest level of user activity is found under the related tags, such as art, fashion, illustrations, handicrafts, etc.

Indeed, users of Tumblr are more likely to have a sense of establishing a "personal brand" or "personal identification system," who carefully arrange the content of the pages, select topics of interest, and carefully reblog ... because you're releasing a set Information, the establishment of the theme page.

In Kapu's design philosophy, "publishing content" and "visual experience" are at the core of his concern.

So instead of seeing people on their own personal pages, users are concerned with a variety of tags that are relevant to your interests, and you are not the only one you are looking for, but a theme blog, a sidebar recommendation It's often too much for you to put on your content instead of "people you might know" like pure social networking sites.

The design of these features is just right for users who need to "publish" and "receive" content, especially those who are culturally creative. Their need to export and receive information is far greater than finding social relationships, but at the same time they are not completely divorced from social relationships and the "thematic" core social relationships provided by Tumblr keep them from maintaining an independent blog So do not see the crowd, gradually tired.

Although according to Quantcast, Tumblr has reached 400 million page views per day by May 2011, up from one month ago a year ago and Tumblr is now ranked as the 25th largest site in the United States , But Kapu still hopes to get more visits by gathering celebrities and the media.

According to statistics from Hitwise, a research firm, Oprah Winfrey saw a 43% jump in Twitter traffic after Twitter debuted a week earlier. Other statistics also show that on Facebook, Google's YouTube, Ning and other Web 2.0 sites, website traffic has improved significantly after celebrities create pages.

As early as May 2009, Capstone has said that encouraging celebrities to set up accounts on the Tumblr site has definitely become "part of our roadmap and business plan." In fact, Capo recently even hired a full-time employee to help celebrity users design and manage their blogs. Former CNN anchor Rick Sanchez was recently an active user of this product.

Steve Rubel, vice president of global strategy at Edelman, a large PR firm, thinks that Cappe will work hard in the media: "In my judgment, Tumblr is not in a hurry to make money and is now fully focused on virtuous development, Attract more and more users, let the media settled. "

Today, media outlets like The Economist, GQ, New Yorker, ABC, CNN and Comedy Central have all started deploying at Tumblr. Together with brands such as IBM, EMI, Alexander McQueen, J. Crew and others, companies and brands in Tumblr have formed a strong camp, mostly from the fashion, film, music and media industries.

The low tech costs, the sky-high number of users, and Tumblr's great social skills can all help companies and celebrities spread their message more quickly and easily than ever before in the more traditional platform for page views Those typical efforts can not match.

There are many different reasons for Tumblr's success today, some claim that its functional "subtraction" fills the market; some mention that the presence of media and celebrities has helped; others have said that the whole idea of ​​the product is very special - From the vertical perspective, it is between the microblogging and blog, but also between the social networking sites and personal portal, and the key is the design is simple and easy to operate - for Tumblr's design aesthetics, it seems no one questioned. Even Tom Fishman, senior manager for social media at MTV, said: "We wanted to make a real statement about Tumblr, which does have unique aesthetics and language features. Twitter focuses on real-time information and Facebook is Community Hub Tumblr is an organization that's focused on design, creativity and content sharing, so we're focused on giving users a lot of assets. "

Tumblr's team has always been well aware that they have achieved what they have achieved by sticking to the "ineffable philosophy," and they never dispute what factors are more important in the past four years of development.

Popular network services difficult to profit, has been criticized in the industry. Tumblr 400 million views per day, when converted into revenue? Kapu does not seem to worry about making money, and he hopes to continue to improve the user experience, access to more users and page views.

"Tumblr makes a lot of money." Tumblr can "monetize" simply by adding a Google AdSense ad to each user's dashboard. And he did not do that, hoping to come up with a profitable way to enhance the user experience. Tumblr does charge for some services, such as users can spend 9 dollars to buy the theme decoration of their pages. However, these are supplementary income and will not be the main source of income for Tumblr. Karp has to dig more "natural" business model. Fortunately, Tumblr is still the darling of investors. Tumblr's explosive growth brought Tumblr nearly $ 40 million in investment.

The hour hand points at 11 o'clock, which means they have already finished meeting, back to their seat, now is their time to change the site every day. Cap said: "We will be a small change staggered in order to be able to grasp what changes feasible, what can not .. Select this time because we hope that engineers will be able to find the problem can be present, Moreover, the network will be very smooth during this time. Basically, the changes made the day before will be released the next morning. "

After participating in the discussion of the site changes, Kapp returned to his desk again, facing two screens on the table, one to refresh Tumblr and handle other work, the other to write code.

Imitators

A product is not on fire, to see how many Chinese imitators it can know.

Little bit: Xu Chaojun, founder, innovation workshop to support the project, the first round of financing tens of millions of dollars. Tumblr little bit in the interface with a striking similarity, and even like a mold carved out.

Sina Qing: Sina Qing at the end of May closed beta, it can be said that only learned Tumblr light release product concept, the product made a large-scale adjustment, and Sina's Sina microblogging products.

Push him: operation of the Grand Group pushed him to be their own positioning as "Weibo", has been June 28 registration, the first day of registration of more than 100,000 people, while completing the first round of financing.

Phoenix Express: positioning itself as a high-end social media platform, but it emphasizes that they are not light blog, because weibo much heavier, nor much lighter than the average blog.

Wide Kwan / Wide Island: There are commented that Broadway was the first to make a light blog in China. However, it did not continue because of the conflict with the investors. The original team departed and then founded Kau.