Trumblog

Tumblr, the microblogging platform that’s a simple tool for quickly posting text, photos, music, video, etc., has never included one surprising feature.  Comments.  I’ve never quite understood this decision that limits the social and interactive feature of a blog.  Sure you can add comments by tweaking the template code and using a third party like Disqus, but there is no commenting included natively with the application.

Tumblr does have allow you to “like” a post (a pretty tepid recommendation if you ask me) and if you add something when reblogging a post that addition will appear in the comment-like list of likes and reblogs following the original post.  Now with the new Ask feature in the Messages section there can be direct reader communication. It works like this.

Once implemented a new page is added to your blog, which you can rename and will need to link to from the main pages of the blog.   From that new page readers can submit questions appear in the messages section of your blog dashboard.  From the messages section you can answer the question that then posts the question and response on your blog.

So, this adds a direct feedback mechanism from Tumblr blog readers to the authors, but it is not commenting and does not facilitate conversation around the blog.  However Tumblr has left out (purposely?) a few features to make this truly useful.  First there is no back and forth.  Reader submits, author replies and that seems to be it.  No response to the reply, no follow-up questions, no “asking” about a question.  This is one and done.  Second, there is no system for notification.  If I ask an amazing question and the author responds in a fascinating way, there is no way for me to know that it has been posted.  Maybe I’m missing something, but that seems critical for this functionality to catch on. Finally, Tumblr should drop the whole “ask” thing right away.  That’s going to be useful for about as long as Twitter’s “What are you doing” and Facebook’s “Thomas is…” prefix both were.  People are going to use this for all kinds of communication not just questions. That is if the incomplete feature set doesn’t get in the way of this catching on.

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