Fred Wilson recently wrote a post on his blog in which he argues that the rapid adoption of Twitter and Tumblr were not accidents. Fred sees these microblogging platforms as a direct evolution of blogging and social networks. Recently, I've been mulling over similar thoughts. Clearly, the success of these sites was not accidental; because they took off in a crowded market, these were things that people obviously needed.
The image above is by Fred Wilson.
In this post, we will argue that each category - blogs, social networks and microblogs - forms a separate vertical. Each vertical is focused on a different type of user and serves to fill a different purpose in the bigger landscape of social publishing.
Remember the days in which the more technically inclined of us had web sites? I went through 3 or 4 different versions of my site with about the same content - books I liked, software I'd written, my resume, and my photos. Making a web site was not very difficult if you knew HTML, but was nearly impossible if you did not. The WYSIWYG web site tools never quite worked as expected and in the end people found them unappealing.
Yet, quite a few people did have personal web sites back in the earlier days of world wide web. The biggest problem with those sites, however, was that they were static. The content of a site rarely changed, and even when it did, there was no way for other people to find out. As a result, personal web sites really never caught on with mainstream web users. That all changed when blogs burst on the scene.
Blogs worked because they were like diaries.
Content is presented in reverse chronological order (with the latest content on top). This single fact alone made a big difference, because it quickly showed readers how content was changing and being updated.
The other thing blogs got right was templates. One of the difficulties in making web sites is that
there is an enormous number of ways in which content can be presented, and for people who are not technically savvy
this presents a barrier. Templates solve this problem because pre-structured content leaves less room to screw things up.
So, blogging platforms made it easier for people to publish online without having to deal with HTML. Liberated from the need to deal with technical quirks, people finally had the chance to focus on the content. And they did. Blogging took off in a major way around 2003-2004. At the time, it was really the only only way to do personal publishing online.
Social networks arrived next and reached a much wider audience than blogs.
The reason for this is that social networks are publishing systems where the content is produced automatically
as the consequence of social interactions. For example, writing on a Facebook Wall is a form of
personal publishing, but we just don't generally look at it in that way. We think of it as a message sent to a friend, but an aggregate
of all the messages that we leave amounts to a chunk of our online personal publishing. Posting a photo or a video is no
different, as it is an act of creating personal content.
The trick is that social networks do not emphasize the publishing angle. They focus on the social bits. The publishing occurs in the context of socializing and therefore is transparent. More important, it is perceived as easy. Writing a long blog post is much harder than posting a photo. It is this ease of content creation that immediately made social networks appealing to the mainstream as a method of online content publishing.
Despite the fact that content creation in social networks is very easy, it has a very different purpose and
very different feel from blogging. In social networks the informational bits are scattered, but in blogs, they are focused
and organized sequentially. Social network publishing is very terse, blog publishing is verbose. Is there a form
of publishing which is on one hand as easy as social networking, but as sequential as regular blogs?
Twitter and Tumblr have recently emerged to define this new category of microblogging.
Characterized by ease of use and compactness, these new forms of communication are racing to fill a niche between blogs and social networks. In addition to the standard publishing, which both borrowed from blogs, both services have taken ideas from social networking sites, as well, allowing people to remix and see each other's content.
Twitter has mashed up communication and personal publishing to create a compelling new form of real-time publishing. The idea of expressing of what you are doing right now in less than 140 characters is clever, but remixing other users' posts and allowing people to subscribe to each other's messages was the stroke of genius that made Twitter a hit. But while Twitter is probably a descendant of a chat and social networking, Tumblr is a direct remix of blogging and social networking.
Tumblr dramatically simplifies blogging in the same way that blogs simplified web sites. Unlike traditional blogging software - Blogger, Typepad, Wordpress, MoveableType - Tumblr posts are much more focused and shorter. The simplicity is achieved by focusing each post on a single object - a photo, a video, a link, a quote, or a piece of text. Tumblr supports rich text editing, but it has been downplayed in favor of quick posting. It is also possible to have widgets and other stuff present in your Tumblr's sidebar, but most Tumblr blogs do not use them, favoring instead a clean, bare look. The point is to simplify blogging by focusing on the personal lifestream, the essence of personal content.
Coming back to Fred Wilson's observation - the emergence of microblogging is not an accident. It represents a well known trend of verticalization. When new markets form they continue to be partitioned into niches. Since the gap between blogging and social networking was very wide, and the audience was quite different, microblogging emerged. Tumblr in particular defines a new class of users. These are people who may be daunted by the complexity of blogging platforms, but want more than the primitive publishing offered by social networks. In addition, Tumblr is appealing to users like myself, who use blogging platforms professionally, but are happy with a lighter solution for a personal blog.
In terms of ease of use and elegance of delivery, Tumblr certainly fills its niche. The bigger question is, would people find the social aspects of Tumblr interesting? On one hand, as Fred Wilson points out, the fact that your personal stream is mixed with other people's streams is cool. Beyond cool, however, is there a value in seeing small, random bits from other people's lives? This is different from reading people's blogs, where posts seemed to be lengthier and more topical. Yet, the answer is likely still to be yes.
The personal publishing market evolved from cumbersome web sites to online diaries called blogs to social networks and more recently to microblogs. Each form of personal publishing is different and each has its niche and audience. While social networks have been the most wide spread, the content creation there feels different from publishing. Because traditional blogging platforms are powerful and still require technical know-how, microblogging has evolved as an intermediate form of self-publishing. Microblogging has a shot of spreading blogging further into the mainstream as well as swaying some professional bloggers to start personal blogs.
It will be interesting to see what will to happen to microbogging in 2008. Do you think it is going to take off? Do you have a Tumblr blog today? Are you likely to get one soon? Do you use Twitter?
Disclosure: Fred Wilson is a managing partner of Union Square Ventures, a fund which invested in Alex's company AdaptiveBlue, as well as Twitter and Tumblr.
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Alex:
You and Fred are spot on with the personal publishing thoughts and analysis. I don't use Twitter or Tumblr, but I can see how they fill a vacuum. I think you'll see continued adoption of microblogging, but I think, and I hope for personal reasons, that you'll see a fuller evolution of traditional blogging platforms in '08 as well.
The main takeaway point I see in your post is that as things are made easier, mass adoption naturally takes off. And while I have a couple of Typepad blogs, and am generally pleased with Typepad as a blogging platform, I have a 'wish list' that I hope Six Apart will implement soon.
When the templates are better, and offer dead drop simple drag and drop building blocks/customization; when community elements are easily added, quickly bumping blogs into micro social networks; ultimately, when what I dream of and visualize can be implemented via a Typepad-like platform, which is inexpensive, without designer fees ... then I'll be in content heaven.
I think there are a number of people like myself, that have website/business/network/community dreams ... but financial constraints and platform limitations hold us back. So to sum up, I'm looking for a more robust, and dead simple, blogging/community platform. And at this stage, it isn't Ning, it isn't Typepad, and it isn't WordPress. Where is it????
Posted by: Jeff Crites | December 11, 2007 12:46 AM
I just signed up for Tumblr and couldn't agree more.
I would love it if Tumblr would "follow" all of the comments that I make on blogs. I find commenting quick, easy, and interactive. If i could just import all of the comments i make on various blogs into Tumblr, that would be my 2-3 entries a day.
Posted by: Frank Sinton | December 11, 2007 1:31 AM
I'm right there with you Jeff...
Waiting on the technology that I just know somebody is working on.
btw alex... i was drinking with you guys tonight, way down here in Carolina...
Posted by: Jon | December 11, 2007 2:17 AM
I like the idea thrown by Alex. Comments today are a form of publishing where users are expressing their views. But since they need to be associated with the post they are scattered. If someone could aggregate all in a niceway it would form a new niche space.
Sn- goforAds.com - Free Classifieds
Posted by: Dan Rogers | December 11, 2007 5:14 AM
Well, I guess, thinking of the future, one has to keep in mind how semantic technology could change the market. Right now, personal publishing uses personal wikis, social networks/web pages, blogs, and micro blogs. The problem is that all these applications 'own' the user data. The social graph debate has shown that the lock-in business model is the predominant business model of the current Web 2.0 age.
The rules of the game could change soon if a personal data store, a kind of personal memory, offering channels like
- publishing on web pages (via containers in a 'page as a container'-model),
- blogging and micro blogging (via a blog services),
- and relating to other people (via a public social graph service)
would appear.
A semantic approach to data management (pesonal RDF triple stores) would allow for applications to use the user-owned data instead of owning them. Micro blogging, blogging and normal publishing nowadays create poorly interrelated text chunks that make it difficult to follow a persons thoughts. Not the size of a message and how fast it is delivered is important alown, but the context of it is as well.
I am myself developing an 'artificial memory' (www.artificialmemory.net) application combining semantic technology and high usability to help me master my knowledge. A blog posting there, for example, is nothing else than a knowledge object that is verbally related ('is published by') to another knowledge object that represents a blog-file. Thus a 'message' could be send to different communication channels without being 'taken away' from me by some Web 2.0 application. I believe this is the future: data will be user-owned and applications will become services that will use our data without stealing it from us. The big question is: who will be the provider of 'the' personal database and of 'the' open services platform connecting to it. Neither facebook nor twitter, I guess.
:-) Lars
Posted by: Lars Ludwig | December 11, 2007 5:31 AM
Great idea about having your comments shared and distributed by tumblr automatically. I'd imagine this may be done, manually if not automagically by coComment.com.
Definitely something to look into.
Posted by: Win | December 11, 2007 7:33 AM
Fine post, as usual, Alex. But in my unbiased opinion, the most helpful framework for discussing this stuff is still content/connection:
http://changingway.org/2007/11/19/conversation-content-connection/
Posted by: Andrew | December 11, 2007 7:52 AM
Microblogs fill a gap, sometimes to the detriment of RSS feeds. Why read what a thought leader posted when I can read his/her brief asides to their Twitter community, or questions they poll from Twitter before writing the post?
The Twitter community is for those wanting less than Facebook friendships, but more than blogging readership. Its like sitting in the bus shelter passing time by sharing serendipitous comments to the fellow next to you.
Posted by: Derek | December 11, 2007 8:37 AM
I enjoy blogs like Readwriteweb because they cover stories that "big media" companies miss or only cover in canned articles. I see something like Tumblr becoming the front end of many of the blogs. A quick easy to read layer on top of more indepth content.
Posted by: Michael | December 11, 2007 8:46 AM
The roadblock to aggregating comments is one of identity -- how does any aggregation system know that comments I leave on three different blogs on different platforms are all by me? Something like OpenID (http://openid.net/) could be the standard that paves the way for the aggregation services that we're hoping for.
Posted by: Leslie Johnston | December 11, 2007 9:05 AM
This is an interesting and insightful review of developing personal publishing.
I particularly like the comment about conversation content and connection. I think this is more important than connecting my comments all over the web into some central location since the comments mostly make sense in terms of their connection to the original blog and the other comments.
I think that what should develop is a commenting system in which each blog becomes a small social network. It would be organized so that it would be easy to return and the comments you had already read would be at the 'bottom.' New comments would be at the top. You would have the capability to reply to comments as well as to comment on the original comment/blog. It would bring together conversation about ideas, which is what tech blogging has mostly been about. It would just make it much easier to do.
Posted by: Bob Boynton | December 11, 2007 8:19 PM
Very interesting theory. One thing's for sure: The last 12 years or so have been a wild ride and I'm glad I was here to experience it all.
Posted by: Matthew Griffin | December 12, 2007 5:00 AM
Overall, I'm bearish on microblogging, at least "Microblogging, circa 2007."
Microblogging may have value for keeping in close contact with friends, but do people with real jobs and a family have time for this stuff? Hence, it might appeal to a limited broad demographic (like Scoble and his merry minions) and to a certain age/gender/geographical demographic. As much as Twitter and Tumblr would like to take credit for this stuff, iMode (in Japan) is really where all of this began: A conjuncted age and gender demographic. Age: Teenagers. Gender: Girls. Geography: Japan.
I look at it this way: If I have time to microblog or to read microblogs, then I should just skip it and cuddle up with the classics, go to the health club, read to a child, partake in a Habitat for Humanity building project. In other words, make my life and the world for those around me a better place. Think Hume.
Posted by: David Scott Lewis | December 13, 2007 6:23 AM