it’s an alternate timeline.

day zero.

google bought tumblr instead of yahoo for the sum of 1.2 billion dollars, narrowly outbidding yahoo. at first, tumblr rejoices. there’s gifs of confetti and cake. screams of ‘ALL HAIL OUR GOOGLE OVERLORDS’ ring throughout the dashboards. as tumblr bloggers go to sleep late at night, there’s a plot brewing from the google offices, as an intern rapidly types away at their keyboard with starbucks at their side.

day thirty seven. 

in business terms, the deal is completed quickly. yahoo according to various news outlets has begun looking at alternatives to invest in. in a joint statement, google and tumblr state they are excited about what the future will bring, interested in integrating new features and bringing forth a new social blogging platform. 

tumblr bloggers once again rejoice, at the thought that popular extensions like xkit and missing e may finally be integrated into tumblr’s interface without consequence. 

day thirty eight. 

it’ will be remembered as integration monday. 

when tumblr bloggers log on before they head to school, they’re prompted to link their gmail account to tumblr. confusion spreads across the dashboard, as australians and europeans that experienced the change try to explain what’s going on to their american counterparts. google believes that for the ultimate experience on tumblr, a gmail account needs to be included, which will in return link it up with the google+ account and youtube account. 

flabbergasted, there’s minor outrage. but everyone remembers google being the saviors, the one that saved tumblr from yahoo. most agree it’s for the best, a few close down their tumblr accounts and there’s murmurs of looking for alternatives. 

day fourty five.

parents and grandparents have started to join tumblr, hearing that it’s the ‘next big thing’. no teenager is safe, as there are mass deletions and url changes. 

day fifty two. 

the ads have arrived.

at first, it seemed like a good idea. google promised it would be by user’s choice to integrate ads into their tumblr pages—a small cut of the proceeds would be forwarded to the user’s paypal accounts while the rest would go to running tumblr. ads on the dashboard would be unavoidable, but they’re small promotions integrated with other posts from people that tumblr users follow. 

many adopt the new ad format with the promise of a third of a cent per click. 

day seventy six.

google’s ad experiment is deemed as being, while inventive, also a failure. too many tumblr users were clicking their own ads in an attempt to make a profit. ‘ad swapping’ also became a trend, where masterposts were made with users pages to click ads, greatly inflating profits and skewing google’s revenue. the option for tumblr users to participate is taken away. 

a new blogging platform is starting to experience mass migration from tumblr users. 

day eighty two. 

ask boxes are taken away in exchange of a chat system. google ignores the outrage, thinking that it would be better to fund the social blogging platform and mainstream it. 

day eighty four. 

text posts are shortened to a 500 character limit, isolating many writers, fandom analysts, and social justice bloggers.

day one hundred and three.

ad intregration is in full force. tumblr users are alarmed as ads seem to be specifically tailored to their tastes and auto-prediction takes a whole new form of creepy. users are asked if they wish to share the emails on tumblr, the youtube videos watched, even their private conversations through tumblr’s new chat system. 

now a platform for the middle aged and elderly; teenagers, college students and young adults have migrated in mass to the new blogging platform with a catchy name and a calming green theme. 

day four hunded and sixty seven. 

tumblr is closed down, like many google projects before it. david karp sits in his manhattan apartment, sipping fine wine. 

SO I GOOGLED CUTE SLOTHS

THIS IS NOT WHAT I ASKED FOR