Marco Arment on Tumblr founder David Karp:
David always obsessed over his newest ideas, features, and designs until they were completely polished and ready to go. He’s a workaholic — he truly lives and breathes Tumblr. I’ve never even seen him show any desire to work on a side project. David is all Tumblr, all the time.
He expects people around him to be similarly into work and Tumblr, and often drove me hard with seemingly impossible demands. But David has a lot of Steve Jobs-like qualities, and like many people who worked for Steve, I look back on Tumblr’s crunch times with mixed feelings: I don’t want to return to that stress level, but David pushed me to do amazing work that I didn’t think was possible.
Marco has nothing but nice things to say about David and the more I read about this deal, the more excited I am at what could happen. It’s good to be excited for the web again.
For all my writing, I use a Mac or iOS device. For my MBP, I use Byword to compose and export to HTML and MarsEdit to publish. On iOS, I exclusively use Poster; If it weren’t for the occasional image and video embeds, I’d probably use it over my Mac 90% of the time.
On the few occasions I end up on a non-Apple computer, I can’t write. My workflow uses Markdown and I can’t or don’t want to install dedicated software on the Linux and Windows computers I come in contact with. Enter Dillinger.
Dillinger is an open source, online Markdown editor with some fantasic features like links to Dropbox and GitHub. It also has the standard export features that most editors have. It’s dual pane so you can see your formatted text as your type. It’s pretty amazing.
Dillinger was started by Joe McCann.
Matt Mullenweg, who started WordPress, wrote a quick piece on how he’s seen import activity from Tumblr to WordPress spike leading up to the announcement. Some quickly thought that was a sign that users don’t think Tumblr will last long or Yahoo will screw it up. I don’t think they have much to fear.
First, I think the platforms are very different – more so than you might think. Tumblr is a simpler blogging platform. That’s great for most people with a bunch of lifestyle rebog posts. Thankfully, Tumblr can also be quite powerful but you have to work at. WordPress is much, much more powerful out of the gate and takes some extra configuration to get it to a decent state. Plus, post formats isn’t as mature yet (coming in the next version, though).
Second, Flickr didn’t get screwed up because Yahoo did something to ruin in. It was screwed up by Yahoo not doing something to it. It got stale, boring, and, to a degree, a little more mainstream. Many pros post to 500px now. That is Tumblr’s biggest risk if you ask me.
And, if we are to believe Marisa Mayer, they’ll let Tumblr exist on its own for the foreseeable future. She’s on a brand transformation mission. She has to focus on being relevant again and, I’m sure, won’t do anything to mess that up.
You’re probably not going to get this news first from me but Yahoo is rumored to be buying Tumblr for $1.1b.
Yahoo is getting a great platform. Not sure what Tumblr is getting besides all that cash. I’m sure there are integration opportunities between the two but if I have to sign in with a Yahoo ID, I’m quitting.
Similar to decision fatigue, I’m interested in what some call analysis paralysis. It’s where you over think a situation or decision, you lose sight of what you need to achieve or act on. It’s a huge productivity killer and greatly impacts on your agility to solve tough problems. This piece on performing too much due diligence from Fred Wilson reminds me of that:
…you can do too much due diligence. It’s important to talk to the market and hear what it is saying. But you have to balance that with other things; the quality of the team, the product, the user experience, etc. You cannot rely alone on due diligence, particularly early on in the development of a company and a market.