Thoughts on Tumblr Explore & Open API’s
In regards to the “Into Your Music” section on Tumblr Explore, yvynyl wrote:
What does this mean? ’Powered by Hype Machine’? Has Tumblr partnered up with HypeM? Are they just using HypeM to draw in this data? Is this an ad? How can I look at more besides Bloc Party, Ting Tings and MGMT on the Explore page?
As much as I love Tumblr, I have to say that the Explore page doesn’t seem very well thought out. More importantly, it’s a good example of why I’ve been arguing for Tumblr to open up their platform so third-party developers can build better experiences on their behalf.
I believe this music section displays a static list of three bands: Bloc party, MGMT, and The Ting Tings. How or why those bands were selected isn’t clear, but what is clear is that they haven’t changed since Explore launched. Below each artist, you see a list of Tumblr members who mentioned those artists names in any post type, not just audio posts. As you can see above, several people are gaming the system by simply writing one post that mentions the three bands in any way (note that the guy with glasses is the first result in all three sections). I assume the “Powered By The Hype Machine” means that HypeM is scanning the text of all Tumblr posts for mentions of one or more of the three bands. What I hoped this section would do was something similar to the Hype Machine site… scan all audio posts, rank the most popular artists over a recent period, and display people who posted tracks from that dynamic list of bands. Or, maybe personalize it by comparing your music to people with similar taste. Right now, the feature isn’t compelling.
The “Colorful” section acts much the same way. Post something matching the green default color and you’re on Tumblr Explore. Not really interesting or useful… although it is pretty.
As far as I can tell, the “Explore” section at the top of the page and the “On Our Radar” section are manually selected by Tumblr staff. In my opinion, those sections would be a lot more interesting if they were powered by the Tumblr community through a simple algorithm that ranked posts by reblogs, but also factored in things like number of followers (10 reblogs for a post from a person with 10 followers should score better than 10 reblogs for a person with 1,000 followers), reblog velocity (10 reblogs in the last hour should score better than 10 reblogs in the last day), and time of day (10 reblogs at 4AM should score better than 10 reblogs at 10AM).
Of course, I realize that Tumblr is short-staffed and that they can’t possibly address every feature request. That’s why I’ve been hoping for a set of API’s that expose everyone’s aggregate activity rather than data on just one person’s blog. Twitter and FriendFeed did that early on and, as a result, there are thousands of third-party sites that slice and dice the underlying data in unique and interesting ways. Tumblr, by comparison, is a closed system, which is unfortunate and severely stunting their growth and usefulness. If there were good API’s for everyone’s activity and for each person’s Dashboard, some third party developer would build a better Explore experience as well as things like iPhone apps, desktop Air clients, cool visualizations, and much more. This would also free up Tumblr resources to focus more on the underlying platform.
I hope those changes come soon so that the amazing community here on Tumblr continues to flourish. David and Marco do an incredible job for such as small team. Opening up the platform would make things that much more exciting and interesting.
