Microblogging platform review

What is this, and why does it exist?

Microblogging or tumblelog is that (relatively) new trendy type of social website (social .. yes, but not quite like facebook) where you have this never ending stream of pictures, video, quotes, or texts - where you can reblog, like or share and add new content.

For the "content creator" it's way faster than writing long articles on the "traditional" platform like blogger.com or wordpress.com and microblogging serves the purpose of having a hand on the pulse of the internet, much like twitter but with more emphasis on pictures and videos. That's why you can also find #hashtags on tumbleblog. And the reblogging is an even faster way to share content that will snowball and could actually in matter of hours spread all over the interwebs.

For the "surfer" - the fun part about microblogging is that selection of blog you select and will follow and which will merge with the current stream of informations and give you that unique personalized content you will be scrolling endlessly everyday - a very important tool in the procrastinator arsenal.

While facebook is for connecting with friends, and family - tumbleblog are more like a way to connect with like minded people, writers, cosplayers, freelances, comics artists, comedians, spiritual teacher etc ...

Some examples, okay ...

The most famous platform is (probably) tumblr.com - so famous in fact, that it has this "aura" of pillar of the internet (along with 4chan, reddit, twitter and facebook).

But it's not the only one, there's soup.io  quite popular in central Europe, Germany and Austria.

There's also diaspora which is a platform that from the beginning has a priority on privacy and respect for the user (for those who don't trust facebook or google+)

In my experience every of these platform had a quite difficult time in their beginning  - when users were constantly having errors and couldn't post because of server's errors and whatnot.

NB : The first time I discovered the tumbleblog concept was with the now defunct meme.yahoo.com  (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahoo!_Meme for more details) - it seems like they had a different strategy in mind because later they bought tumblr.com

Which is like usual saying something on the quality of the platform - the importance, isn't in the technology or the ease of use, but really in the number of people connecting, using and interacting with it. For people that don't know what I'm talking about they should look for the rise and fall of myspace.com.