Sharing Online, but With More Than 140 Characters

The singer and guitarist John Mayer, whose prolific posts on Twitter drew nearly four million followers, shocked fans in mid-September by closing his account. 

But Mr. Mayer hasn’t gone away. He’s switched from Twitter to Tumblr, a free blogging service that has become a hit among Internet enthusiasts. Tumblr, based in New York, says it is drawing 30,000 new members a day. Mr. Mayer, whose heavy Twitter use was said to have upset his girlfriends, posted that “I have an even larger Tumblr addiction.”

 

The allure of Tumblr and a similar service called Posterous is in their social features and their simplicity. They are only slightly more complicated than Twitter to figure out. Yet they allow you to go well beyond 140 characters of text per post, and to include photos, videos and excerpts from other users’ posts. Mr. Mayer, for example, used Tumblr to share a touching fan letter.

 

Tumblr’s ad hoc community of users includes Robert Reich, the former labor secretary, who is now a professor of public policy at the University of California, Berkeley. “Tumblr is incredibly easy to use, wonderful to navigate,” Mr. Reich said in an e-mail. His Web site, robertreich.org, is actually a Tumblr blog, or “a Tumblr” or “tumblelog” in online jargon. 

But the undisputed king of Tumblr is Anthony De Rosa, who has collected nearly 11,000 followers at his SoupSoup page. Mr. De Rosa, a 34-year-old resident of Hoboken, N.J., posts a hard-to-categorize jumble of other people’s blog posts, photos and videos he finds interesting. A picture of Lady Gaga before she became famous. A news item about Internet wiretaps. A parody of bad science reporting. You could easily imagine Stephen Colbert pawing through SoupSoup for joke fodder.

 

Mr. De Rosa said in an e-mail that when he started using Tumblr in 2007, he saw it as little more than a way to upload photos from his phone.

 

“Not long after that, I discovered following other people on Tumblr, which means you get all their posts sent to you in your Tumblr dashboard,” he said. “And reblogging, which allows you to take posts from other Tumblrs and place them on your own, usually adding your own commentary on the post. It didn’t take long for it to occur to me that there was a lot of depth that other platforms, like WordPress, were lacking.”

 

Well-known publications including Newsweek, The Atlantic and Politico have set up their own Tumblrs. 

more at nytimes