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elfsJoel Spolsky, who's brilliance clearly comes from a planet different from my own, has a talk on his blog entitled Simplicity vs Choice.
One of the distinguishing points he makes is that 37 Signals, the people who make Basecamp and a raft of other nifty web applications using Rails, base their business model on doing less. Taking away all the decisions that people have to make and leaving them with only the core, critical things that need doing. He played a clip from the Tom Hanks vehicle You've Got Mail, in which Hanks extolls Starbucks and its way of giving people who hate making decisions the ability to make a decision that feeds into their self-identity. Somehow, Starbucks has turned "I drink triple-machiattos" into "I'm a triple-machiatto drinker," whatever a triple machiatto is.
He put up a slide that showed these two camps: "Less features," and "Defining Sense of Self." It hit me then that Tumblr has managed to thread that needle so precisely that it's mind boggling.
Tumblr is a blog engine where people can talk about themselves, like LiveJournal or Wordpress, but it has three defining characteristics: (1) every post has a media category (text, image, embedded), and it's hard to mix and match these; (2) reblogging (i.e. copying content from another blog and just adding "me too!") is trivially easy (this creates the most incredible ecosystem for the curation of porn you've ever seen, as pornhounds will just reblog photos from other Tumblr blogs, and fans just have collections of their favorite curators), and (3) no comments. It's all about you. There are no decisions to be made at all, except what you're going to blog about next.
On the other hand, Tumblr has the most incredible customization of the look and feel of your blog ever seen. It's all hand-written HTML with embedded code that contains loops and the various elements that deploy their various element types. The documentation of this language is 20 pages long, and is just about the element embedding. You have to know HTML (and CSS, and Javascript) if you want to do anything interesting.
Tumblr has both: a rich ecosystem that lets users "define their sense of self" while at the same time depriving them of any features that would make their experience disappointing. On the other hand, the barrier between choosing a theme and creating a theme is so vast that only those who relish the challenge of graphic design take on the challenge.
One of the distinguishing points he makes is that 37 Signals, the people who make Basecamp and a raft of other nifty web applications using Rails, base their business model on doing less. Taking away all the decisions that people have to make and leaving them with only the core, critical things that need doing. He played a clip from the Tom Hanks vehicle You've Got Mail, in which Hanks extolls Starbucks and its way of giving people who hate making decisions the ability to make a decision that feeds into their self-identity. Somehow, Starbucks has turned "I drink triple-machiattos" into "I'm a triple-machiatto drinker," whatever a triple machiatto is.
He put up a slide that showed these two camps: "Less features," and "Defining Sense of Self." It hit me then that Tumblr has managed to thread that needle so precisely that it's mind boggling.
Tumblr is a blog engine where people can talk about themselves, like LiveJournal or Wordpress, but it has three defining characteristics: (1) every post has a media category (text, image, embedded), and it's hard to mix and match these; (2) reblogging (i.e. copying content from another blog and just adding "me too!") is trivially easy (this creates the most incredible ecosystem for the curation of porn you've ever seen, as pornhounds will just reblog photos from other Tumblr blogs, and fans just have collections of their favorite curators), and (3) no comments. It's all about you. There are no decisions to be made at all, except what you're going to blog about next.
On the other hand, Tumblr has the most incredible customization of the look and feel of your blog ever seen. It's all hand-written HTML with embedded code that contains loops and the various elements that deploy their various element types. The documentation of this language is 20 pages long, and is just about the element embedding. You have to know HTML (and CSS, and Javascript) if you want to do anything interesting.
Tumblr has both: a rich ecosystem that lets users "define their sense of self" while at the same time depriving them of any features that would make their experience disappointing. On the other hand, the barrier between choosing a theme and creating a theme is so vast that only those who relish the challenge of graphic design take on the challenge.
