Shouts & Murmurs: The Collected Letters of Marissa Mayer and David Karp
My darling David,
Don’t let these earthly considerations stand in the way of our relationship. Getting to know Tumblr has been the biggest joy of my life. I have never felt so young, so alive, so full of hope for the future as when I am watching your metrics rise exponentially each day.
Oh, I was looking at some of your photos online the other day. Please don’t wear your Google Glass when I introduce you to my board. I want them to approve of you.
All my love, Marissa
—Caitlin Kelly imagines an exchange between Marissa Mayer and David Karp: http://nyr.kr/19XTw6V
What Yahoo Bought with a Billion Dollars: Hope
It’s too early to say whether Yahoo will screw up Tumblr—by making it ugly, by introducing terrible advertising, by obscuring its wealth of adult content, or by simply casting a pall over it so great that the site’s fickle younger users abandon it. It’s also too early to say whether Yahoo screwed up by buying Tumblr, whose explosive growth has slowed of late, according to Quantcast numbers. Or, more hopefully, maybe Yahoo made its first wildly successful acquisition and the two companies will grow together; Instagram, for example, has in many ways (though not all) been a model acquisition, with the majority of its users having signed up after its purchase by Facebook. The outcome may depend almost entirely on how happy Yahoo makes Karp. (Tumblr’s co-founder, Marco Arment,writes that “Tumblr is David, and David is Tumblr.”) Regardless, Yahoo’s acquisition further concentrates social networking in the hands of a few companies, leaving Twitter and Pinterest behind as the only big, independent social networks of their ilk aside from Facebook.
—Matt Buchanan on Yahoo’s acquisition of Tumblr: http://nyr.kr/10JTYog
