[And now the third installment in our increasingly extended 2008 retrospective regarding about micro-blogging (and its relation to micro-messaging). In the last post of the series we examined Publr, the first of several micro-blogging platform we plan to take a look at. We left off with:

But there are four more micro-blogging services to talk about, each with their own interesting aspects and potential implications for the evolution of the Social Web. Not to mention what all this means for normal blogs (macro-blogs?)...]

If Twitter is the canonical micro-messaging tool then Tumblr might be the canonical micro-blogging tool. Tumblr boasts a healthy 500,000 users, but that’s still rather light compared to Twitter’s 3 million (and just for scale keep in mind that Facebook has around 150 million).

So in the grand scheme of things Tumblr is still relatively small, but it’s still the largest and most visible of this genre of micro-blogging platforms. In fact, some sources—including Wikipedia—call micro-blogs “tumblelogs.” (The term isn’t much of a guarantee of status; Google’s Blogger platform is by no means the preeminent tool for bloggers, for example.) Lifehacker’s early coverage of Tumblr gives a solid explanation of the micro-blogging/tumblelogging form. It’s worth reading if you find yourself confused as to what exactly these things are but also interesting as documentary proof of the newness of this style of content creation as of March ‘07. And it was Tumblr that seems to have set the model back then for a new category of social web tools.

What was that model? Well, micro-blogging is really a lot like blogging…only smaller. We covered this a bit last time:

[A micro-blog] provides the user with a very simple dashboard from which to create a variety of different kinds of posts: text (like a “traditional” blog post), photo, video, audio, link (such that the post title link takes you to an external page rather than than a single-post page), chat (which automatically formats text to look like a instant message conversation using colons and line-breaks) and quote (explicitly for text from elsewhere that one wants to share). There are no “read more” links, the entirety of every post displays always. There are no comments and there is limited profile information.

So perhaps not so much smaller as lighter. Almost all of the familiar bells and whistles one finds on “macro-blogs” are stripped away: no side bar, no widgets, no categories, no comments (though Tumblr still has tags and archives they are not nearly as prominent as they would be on a typical older blogging platform). But this is only a starting point, full access to HTML and CSS means that code can be added to one’s page to recreate these features should one choose to do so.

What really defines Tumblr and services like it is the ability to follow other users and be followed by them. This is also what makes micro-blogging so similar to micro-messaging. The premise of Twitter and all the services like it is that users follow each other in order to receive each other’s updates. The result is an incoming stream of news from everyone you follow and an outgoing stream to everyone who follows you. The same model is at work in Tumblr, but instead of 140 character snippets the content can be anything from a thousand word diatribe about politics to a picture of a flower posted without title or comment.

Everything posted by the people a user follows appears in that user’s dashboard—the screen that one sees upon logging in. This makes for a very different model of content consumption than the one at play with traditional blogs. Instead of visiting multiple sites to see if they’ve been updated there’s just one central location where new material is delivered directly.

This is far from a unique capability. RSS feed readers (both desktop applications like NetNewsWire and Web applications like Google Reader) will collect new posts from all the blogs or other RSS-equiped sites that a user chooses to subscribe to. Aggregation tools like FriendFeed allow users to import all sorts of material, from blog posts to activity streams from places like Facebook.

The major difference is that all of those tools are oriented towards consumption of content. The Tumblr dashboard is about both consumption and production of new content. Users can create new posts of their own from the same page they read new ones from the people they follow. The interface further facilitates this by making it easy to “reblog” all or part of what someone else has posted and add a  contribution, allowing for both threaded conversations among small groups and wide and rapid dissemination of popular content throughout the larger community.

And the nature (and just existence) of that larger community is one of the most interesting things about Tumblr. While not encompassing all of it users, there is an identifiable culture on the site. This is possible because of its small size, its particular origin story (it’s a New York creation, not a San Francisco one) and its tendency to compel users to encourage their friends to participate along with them, among other factors. As the tech gossip blog Valleywag put it over the summer:

You won’t find Tumblr in your sysadmin’s RSS feeds. Tumblr bloggers follow one another on the site’s internal Dashboard system. By design, the site limits bloggers to a few formats, gracefully styling their most self-aggrandizing prose into tasty niblets. It’s like the beauty of a three-chord postpunk love song packaged as a middle-school love note: “Do you want to / Follow me? / Yes/No”

New York’s chattering classes — the new old media kids, the new new media kids, and the even newer kids who want to be the new new kids — have gleefully hopped aboard Tumblr.

Or as they also noted at one point, “New evidence suggests Tumblr users exist outside of Brooklyn.”

It’s typical for Valleywag to cover new social tools like Tumblr, but not nearly as typical for Gawker (the New York publishing industry and gossip blog that is the flagship of Gawker Media, of which Valleywag is a part) to do so. And yet, because of the community that Tumblr happened to absorb, it merits discussion not just on sites oriented technology but also those oriented towards culture—it merits discussion in terms of how the two intersect.

The advantage of Tumblr is in not doing what the blogs above do, but in sharing fun things from the Internet or leaving very short messages that would seem skimpy on most WordPress or Movable Type blogs.

The comparison made here between Tumblr and WordPress of Movable Type points to different social standards for the use of these tools. Even absent the particular culture Valleywag refers to there is a set of conventions that influence content on Tumblr. This translates into a style and pattern of usage that lends itself to the formation of stronger connection than are possible on a site like Facebook. Posts can be small and light (unlike the more “serious” material that appears on “traditional” blogs) and following someone isn’t just a matter of adding them to an endless roll of “friends” but results in their new content flowing into a user’s dashboard (which happens frequently because the theshold for posting is lower than on a heavier blog). That’s a commitment. It’s a content-based commitment that connects people in a way that influences what content they see and what presentation style they become accustomed to.

So it’s no surprise that the new relationships that form on Tumblr or the pre-existing ones that translate there are robust enough to merit offline association. The Tumblr staff has been encouraging this sort of behavior: They posted on their Tumblr that they would send Tumblr stickers to people organizing meet-ups.

And subsequently the staff reblogged announcements from users who organized meet-ups. The staff or company isn’t organizing events, they’re relying on members of the community to do so and then promoting the organically emerging offline activities.

This is a relatively novel formation online and a strong realization of what the Social Web was always supposed to be. People are creating new content, sharing content they discover elsewhere and also their friends’ content, doing all this across all different media and forming both a large-scale user culture and smaller tightly-knit communities.

But it’s important not to lose sight of the fact that all this material also appears on the public Web just like posts on other, non-micro blogs. The activity on Tumblr has dynamic and generative features internal to the community, but that still results in creating things that anyone can access. Hardly a walled garden.

And Tumblr continues to grow and evolve. In the past week a redesigned interface went live and today the staff Tumblr announced:

We’re so excited to partner with the Obama Inaugural Committee for this historic Inauguration!

Follow today’s events, live, on the official Inauguration tumblelog. But more importantly, share your Inauguration Day moments to have them included in the feed.

The Tumblr team worked incredibly hard to pull this together. Congrats to everyone involved!

But most significantly Tumblr managed to get 5 million dollars in venture capital last month. That’s fairly impressive considering the economic circumstances. Again, an insight into the cultural position of the tool can be gleaned by looking to a site like Gawker rather than a tech news site for this news:

The economy might be imploding, but Tumblr is RICH! The micro-blogging service/hipster nerve center raised $4.5 million in a round led by Union Square Ventures and Spark Capital, which means the company is worth $15 million, on paper, even though it doesn’t make any money, at all. But next year it’s going to start selling some “really sexy” add-on features, founder David Karp told All Things Digital.

It’s worth noting this sort of coverage because it illustrates another way that the attitude and tone of Tumblr reinforces itself. How often are other online social tools described like this? The other main example would be Twitter, which of course is discussed far more. But given the accelerating growth of Twitter over 2008, those are good footsteps to be following in going into 2009.