Congrats to the Entire Tumblr Team
Tumblr just announced that Yahoo is acquiring the company for $1.1BN.
I am in awe. David has unbelievable vision and fantastic execution. Huge congratulations to him and the entire team.
I don’t know if everyone knows the inspiration for Tumblr or not. David was very transparent about what inspired him when he launched the service. So I’m reblogging here now:
Last year [2006], a site called project.ioni.st showed us a completely different form. A form with a different focus:
Sharing.
The long editorials with meticulously formatted links and images we were used to seeing on blogs seemed absent. All of the editors’ thoughts, creations, experiences, and discoveries poured down the screen. It was like flipping through the scrapbook of a like-minded person we had never met.
The editors seemed to post with zero obligations. Anything neat they came across went up. Little or no commentary was needed. The only context was the author. How absolutely beautiful.
A tumblelog isn’t better than a blog. It’s not a replacement. But we’re certain it will be a fabulous alternative to the 90% of web users who don’t care to maintain a blog.
It’s something we knew we wanted the moment we laid eyes on it. Something we were even inspired to build.
The best thing you'll read on Yahoo buying Tumblr...
marco.orgcomes from employee #2, practically the co-founder: Marco Arment
“I am grateful as hell for binge-watching. I am grateful that AMC and Sony took a gamble on us in the first place to put us on the air. But I'm just as grateful for an entirely different company that I have no stake in whatsoever: Netflix. I don't think you'd be sitting here interviewing me if it weren't for Netflix. In its third season, Breaking Bad got this amazing nitrous-oxide boost of energy and general public awareness because of Netflix.”
—In Conversation: Vince Gilligan — Vulture
The Breaking Bad creator on Netflix binge-watching and much more
Tumblr and Yahoo
I’m joking around about Tumblr and Yahoo a lot right now, but that’s because making people laugh is my favorite thing. For those who care to hear it, I’ll be clear: let’s give ‘em a chance.
Yahoo lost its way a while ago, but Marissa Mayer has done some good stuff to right the ship in the 10 (yep, only 10) months she’s been there. Yahoo stated that Tumblr will be run as an independent company anyway, so we probably won’t see much “oh no everything’s purple and I have to dust off my Yahoo account” change. The change we do see could very well be great, considering Tumblr’s independence and Yahoo’s crazy resources.
Change isn’t inherently bad, but fearing it is. I’m eager to see where this goes.
Wordpress CEO says thousands already fleeing Tumblr
fastcompany.comWordpress is the world’s most popular blogging platform, and according to CEO Matt Mullenweg, Yahoo’s acquisition of Tumblr was already made it more so.
A Tumblr Primer for Yahoo! Employees:
- Please leave our blogs alone. Don’t tell us what to post, what political leanings to have, what stuff we can link to. Unless it’s outright criminal, in which case please feel free to come over and give us the full Yahoo!-Acquires-Geocities-for-$3.6 billion treatment.
- Please leave the Tumblr staff in place. Say what you will about David Karp and crew — they built this thing from the ground up, Tumblr Hiccups, Tumblarity, stupid GIF ads and all. Despite all the tragicomic (mostly comic) melodramedies (see what I did there?) over a variety of silly things like Missing E and cancelling Storyboard, they’ve done a good job on the whole.
- Please leave Tumblr alone. You acquired it for the cool factor, amirite? (If you say you acquired it for the hipster factor, I will take all your reblogs away.) Don’t tinker with it; don’t change it; don’t fuck with it. Leave it alone. Let David and staff do what they do best: continue to help foster an online community where lots of people give a shit about what lots of other people are blogging about. Let them engage one another with Yahoo! futzing around with trying to “monetize eyeballs” or whatever the fuck it is Wall Street wants you to do. Let Tumblr live; let it flourish. Google’s homepage has looked almost exactly the same since it launched, and look where they are now! (Ed. note — No, dumbass, they offer Gmail and Google Docs and Hangouts and Google Glasses and — dumbass, it’ not just the homepage!)
- Ask us. If you must experiment with Tumblr’s tried-and-true formula, don’t leave out the most important focus group: us. The 100 million + bloggers who are here, using the platform every. Damned. Day. We pretty much know what works and what doesn’t. We’re pretty vocal and outspoken, too, when it comes to stuff we don’t like and do like. Our response is pretty much instantaneous, save for the few of us who like to keep things all bottled up before passive-aggressively spewing all over the Dashboard (Ed. note — Guilty! Sometimes.) We have Ask boxes and Fan Mail and emails so don’t be shy.
- And lastly, there is no rule that you have to like cats to be here. Just thought we’d make that clear.
Stressing Gorilla Glass Makes It Stronger
by Sophie Bushwick, Inside Science
Alterations to the usual glass production process, such as putting the material under stress, can introduce effects that linger even after the material hardens. While manufacturers have long exploited this phenomenon to strengthen glass, a new theory aims to get closer to understanding why it happens.
Glass is not as well understood as most materials, because it straddles the line between liquid and solid. In typical crystalline materials, molecules assemble into a set structure over the span of the entire material as the substance solidifies from a disordered liquid form. Glass, on the other hand, retains a liquid-like disorder even after it hardens.
Without a set architecture, these disordered molecules are particularly vulnerable to outside forces. If you push or pull on a substance, you create internal forces, or stress, in the material itself. Once you remove that force, you’d expect the molecules to return to equilibrium, removing the stresses. But glassy materials “remember” the long-gone force.
