I’ve been reading Fred Wilson’s blog for a long time. One thing that I have learned while reading that blog is that if he is excited about something new, I would be wise to pay attention to it. Even more so if he has invested in it.
And Fred Wilson has started doing something really different. He is using Tumblr to roll a whole bunch of his blogging together at FredWilson.vc. Everyone sit up and pay attention.
This is something that has been missing from the blogosphere for a while – a good way to aggregate all kinds of online activities. Facebook has gotten pretty close, between apps and the newsfeed, I can pull my blog posts and my tweets, and posted items into one place. But that’s still behind a wall that a majority of the internet can’t get to. And I don’t own the content. So that’s no good.
I signed up for Tumblr and played around a bit. Fred is right: it’s fun and easy to use. Quoting things is a snap. This is a great bit of functionality. Clearly you can roll tumblr into your own URL the way Fred has done, and I could do that with Jasonp107.com – I’m not using it for anything right now.
But I don’t want my lifestream to be hosted somewhere else. I like this URL, and I like that it’s mine. I already keep my Google shared items and my Tweets on this page, but it would be cool if I could keep them in-line with posts (that is, without spending the time to mess with the PHP myself—time I don’t really have right now).
I think Tumblr should make a WordPress plug-in that lets people pull their quotes, tweets, and other feeds in-line with their wordpress posts using the Tumblr bookmarklet. At least, that would be good for me. Would it be good for Tumblr? Probably, since it looks like they plan to be a freemium service.