msg: Tumblr Search for Anti-Theft Lunch Bags ...

Original by the michael galpert experience

4:35 am - Mon, Mar 30, 2009: 2 notes

msg:

Tumblr Search for Anti-Theft Lunch Bags
After posting the Anti-Theft Lunch Bags I wanted to see who else found this lovely product delightful, so I went over to tumblr.com/search
Hopefully one day Tumblr’s search will be more dynamic and let me know what other likeminded people liked in the past as well.
What companys are building Discovery engines these days?

Mike, you have two key statements here that beg a much larger question.
Why isn’t Tumblr search more dynamic?
What companies are building discovery engines?
There is a solution to bridge both of these, and it involves Tumblr releasing an API that allows developers to access key elements of the Tumblr ecosystem, namely:
API (or even RSS) access to a user’s Tumblr Dashboard.
API access to my following and follower user list
API access to new Likes and Reblogs of my content w/o monitoring all my content
API access to a public timeline across Tumblr
It’s clear to me why these haven’t been opened up for public consumption though. As I’ve said before, I’ll bet that 95% of all Tumblr content consumption is done via the Dashboard, ergo, it is the single-most valuable piece. In other words, most of Tumblr’s content is consumed by Tumblr members. It’s unfortunate that this walled-garden philosophy has limited the reach of the product in terms of exporting innovation. The 3rd Party applications are so limited (Mashable could barely come up with 5 this past week) compared with other platforms that have much more transparency (ahem, Twitter) and thousands of applications built upon the platform. Time will tell if this approach proves wise, but as single template blogs, custom domains, Likes, Reblogging, Following & Followers become commoditized in the blog platform world, the winning strategy will be the discovery and innovation stack via transparent APIs.

Tumblr Search for Anti-Theft Lunch Bags

After posting the Anti-Theft Lunch Bags I wanted to see who else found this lovely product delightful, so I went over to tumblr.com/search

Hopefully one day Tumblr’s search will be more dynamic and let me know what other likeminded people liked in the past as well.

What companys are building Discovery engines these days?

Mike, you have two key statements here that beg a much larger question.

Why isn’t Tumblr search more dynamic?
What companies are building discovery engines?

There is a solution to bridge both of these, and it involves Tumblr releasing an API that allows developers to access key elements of the Tumblr ecosystem, namely:

API (or even RSS) access to a user’s Tumblr Dashboard.
API access to my following and follower user list
API access to new Likes and Reblogs of my content w/o monitoring all my content
API access to a public timeline across Tumblr

It’s clear to me why these haven’t been opened up for public consumption though. As I’ve said before, I’ll bet that 95% of all Tumblr content consumption is done via the Dashboard, ergo, it is the single-most valuable piece. In other words, most of Tumblr’s content is consumed by Tumblr members. It’s unfortunate that this walled-garden philosophy has limited the reach of the product in terms of exporting innovation. The 3rd Party applications are so limited (Mashable could barely come up with 5 this past week) compared with other platforms that have much more transparency (ahem, Twitter) and thousands of applications built upon the platform. Time will tell if this approach proves wise, but as single template blogs, custom domains, Likes, Reblogging, Following & Followers become commoditized in the blog platform world, the winning strategy will be the discovery and innovation stack via transparent APIs.