Tumblr: Somewhere between Twitter and WordPress

Sometimes, Twitter isn’t quite enough.

Perhaps you want to post a photo or an audio clip. Maybe you need more than 140 characters to discuss a link, but you don’t want to craft a full-blown blog post.

Enter Tumblr.

It’s a mix between Twitter and a blog. You create a profile and blog, choosing a theme that offers the functions you want to provide your audience. If you’re more of a geek, you can code your page from the ground up and use it as your site template. And you get a unique Web address for your site.

So how is it different from WordPress or Blogger?

Typical Tumblr posts are short. Like Twitter, you follow other bloggers on Tumblr who can follow you back. Most users share photos, audio clips, or random thoughts in a Twitter-like delivery system.

Although you write and post to your blog, posts also appear in the streams of your followers (a la Twitter). And when you log in, Tumblr takes you to your primary stream. It will show the latest posts from the people you follow on Tumblr.

You can reply to their posts in stream, reblog them on your own blog (Tumblr’s version of a retweet), or note a post with a heart, letting people know you liked a particular post (much like using stars in Twitter).

Tumblr’s primary advantage is ease of use. Once you think of it in a Twitter context, it becomes a bit easier to navigate. Don’t think of it as a blog where you broadcast to the world. It’s a way of sharing content and interacting with followers. There’s just more space in which to do it.

As Twitter becomes crowded with commercialism and celebrities, some of the geekerati are making their way to Tumblr. Already, more than 4 million people have signed up for the service and more than 550 million posts have appeared.

That’s many voices to be heard.

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