It’s been said (by Steve Jobs, no less) that good design is not just about how a thing looks but rather about how a thing works. But maybe design is also about how a thing feels.
The design of Tumblr, the blogging tool and social network, is guided by feeling. In particular, the feelings of David Karp, the company’s 26-year-old founder, whose instincts tend to run counter to current Web conventions. Tumblr does not display “follower” counts, for example, or other numerical markers of popularity that are viewed as crucial social-media features, because Karp finds them “really gross.” The culture of public friend-and-follow reciprocity that theoretically expands a social networking service can, in his view, “really poison a whole community.”
Possibly such a view of Internet culture could be arrived at by way of deliberate study of online group behavior. But that’s not how Tumblr was made. “David built it for himself,” John Maloney, until recently the company’s president, told me. Marco Arment, Karp’s first employee, who participated directly in the service’s creation, put it even more succinctly: “Tumblr is David.”
I met Karp in Tumblr’s offices in the Flatiron district in New York. In his standard uniform of Jack Purcell sneakers, dark pants and a hoodie over a patterned shirt, Karp was polite, upbeat, inclusive and big on eye contact. Asked a question about competitors, he answered: “The last thing we want to do is compete with someone. That’s for bankers.” Karp likes to talk about Tumblr less as a business than as a “platform for creativity.” And indeed, it has been used to make more than 60 million blogs — among them a visual scrapbook kept by Michael Stipe; silly meme-blogs like Hey Girl, It’s Paul Ryan; and the clever graphic analysis that became the recent book “I Love Charts” — drawing a combined 17.5 billion page views a month.
The trick is making page views equal money. “Pretty much every large tech company today,” Karp said, is essentially “metrics driven.” Google, Twitter, Facebook: they’re obsessed with “optimizing” services, design, functionality and aesthetics through constant testing and tweaking. That ability to optimize and (not incidentally) monetize user experiences by reacting to microlevel data is the essence of Web-business magic, as it is generally understood.
Karp chose not to operate that way. Rather than monetizing clicks, he wants advertisers to view Tumblr as a place to promote particularly creative campaigns to an audience whose attention is worth paying for. It’s an approach that may or may not guide Tumblr into the black. But Karp isn’t worried. His nice-young-man aspect makes it easy to miss the brashness of what he is saying: he isn’t interested in competing, but not because he doesn’t like competition. He just feels that he sees something everyone else has missed. (...)
Trying to blog at first made David Karp feel bad: that big, empty text box seemed to demand a lot of carefully constructed words, an intimidating sight for a nonwriter. The first iteration of Tumblr was a tool for “tumblelogging” (a short-form variation on blogging) designed to make it easier and less off-putting. It was released in 2007, and Tech Crunch promptly praised its simplicity: “There is absolutely no learning curve.”
Like any blogging tool, Tumblr allows users to design a site from a behind-the-scenes “dashboard,” where you type a post or upload a photo, and choose a visual “theme.” Tumblr’s dashboard incorporates some familiar elements of social Web services: in addition to making your own posts, you can “follow” or appreciate those of other Tumblr users. You can repost images and other content onto your own blog easily, and this helped Tumblr develop a reputation as a more visually oriented, multimedia version of Twitter.
In the beginning, most traffic came to Tumblr from without; but now more than 70 percent of the traffic on Tumblr occurs in the dashboard zone, where users read, react to and repurpose one another’s posts. The upshot is “the mullet theory of social software design,” summarizes Chris Muscarella, a tech-entrepreneur friend of Karp’s. “It’s all business in the front: you have your blog that looks like any other blog, although usually prettier. And then the real party is in the back, through the social interaction on the dashboard.”
The features Tumblr eliminates are as important to the way it feels as those it adopts. Bijan Sabet of Spark Capital, an early Tumblr investor who sits on its board, says that it is “normal behavior” for a founder to be excited about adding new bells and whistles, but Karp seems excited about doing the opposite: “He’ll tell us, ‘Hey, got a new version coming up — and I took four features out!’ ”
by Rob Walker, NY Times | Read more:
Photo illustration by Clang. Set design: Cindy Sandmann
