TheWayoftheWeb

Content and Digital Marketing Specialists

tumblr

2013 Reviews of the Year

By

As 2013 draws to an end, almost everyone is busy either compiling their reviews of the past 12 months, or publishing predictions and trends for 2014.

Predicting the future is always difficult, even when you spend your life watching an industry closely – it’s easy to get caught up in enthusiasm and shorten the timeline that you might have logically thought, and there are always external factors and events which we don’t know about yet which could mix things up a bit more…

Annual reviews can also lead to an overwhelming amount of information and data, but there’s often inspiration to be found, so we’ve compiled some of the 2013 reviews from the big internet names to share:

Tumblr 2013 Year in Review:

Tumblr2013YearinReview

Tumblr has released a big categorised review, including everything from New and Top blogs, to the most popular in Movies, Music, and even Sponsored Posts. Plenty of inspiration and enjoyment to be had, particularly if you’re a fan on animated Gifs.

Pinterest: Top Pins of 2013:

Pinterest2013TopPins

Staying with categorised imagery, Pinterest has also released a ‘top pins’ for 2013, separated in categories such as Home Decor, Art, Design and by country ( UK, France, Italy, Sweden, Norway, Denmark and Finland).

Google: Zeitgeist 2013:

GoogleYearinReview2013

As always, Google has produced a range of videos and data to cover the top searches in 2013. Exploring the data via Google Trends is a bit more useful from a business perspective.

Bing: Review of the Year 2013:

BingReviewoftheyear

Bing has released the 2013 top searches etc in a more traditional article style via MSN news. Strangely they released the url bingtrends.com which redirects to MSN news for the UK. Either way, the information is there.

Facebook: Stories 2013

FacebookStories

Facebook Stories 2013 includes video and the Most Talked About Topics etc near you, as well as personal Year in Review features. Also available in text format for global and US information.

Reddit Top Posts and Stats of 2013:

redditlogo

When you start a look back at 2013 with 56 billion pageviews, 731 million unique visitors and 404,603,286 comments, it’s not been a bad 2013 for Reddit. Also includes top countries, top posts, and highlights from the End of Year awards.

Slideshare Zeitgeist:

Instagram has released blog posts covering 2013 Top Moments, and 2013 Top Locations.

And with a day to go, the most popular articles on TheWayoftheWeb.net in 2013 were:

Tumblr: Stats, the ability to add pages, and revenue on the way

By

I’m a big fan of both Tumblr and Posterous, despite not really having the time/project to make the best use of them at the moment. So the fact that Tumblr has released a new feature, some interesting statistics and signs of new revenue streams launching soon has reignited my thoughts on how I could use the service effectively.

The new feature is the ability to add static pages – which will aid companies and bloggers looking to keep content highlighted. Adding a page is simple, with three layouts to choose from.

And it will only build on some pretty impressive statistics released today – 1 billion page views in February 2010 for starters. It also has 2 million posts every day, 15,000 new posts daily, and 18 new posts and reblogs every second.

Incidentally, 1 billion page views in February equals 36 million page views per day, 25,000 page views per minute, or 400 per second. And Tumblr has put together a nice infographic to show off the info.

And if that isn’t enough, apparently there are also plans to unveil two new revenue generating features next month.

For a personal or simple company blog, I’d definitely recommend checking out Tumblr or Posterous. They’re easier to update than a traditional hosted blog platform (whether Blogger or WordPress), and offer as many design options etc. Ultimately a full self-hosted blog platform such as WordPress (Which this site uses) offers some additional advantages, but if you don’t want the hassle or advertising, then go with the microblogging platforms.

A recap on the original three microblogging platforms

By

Once upon a time, there were three prominent microblogging platforms, Twitter, Plurk and Jaiku. One became incredibly popular, one introduced a side-on view, and one was acquired and then released by the Google Fairy Godmother.

Others fell by the wayside, including Pownce, and Rejaw.

But how do they compare now, after the mainstream adoption of Twitter:

Obviously this doesn’t tell the complete story, as it tracks web visits only, but it’s safe to assume it’s proportionally correct. Twitter’s close to 25 million Unique Visitors, Plurk is holding steady between 250,000-300,000 for the past year, and Jaiku has dropped from 70,000 down to 30-40,000 for the last two months measured.

In fact, it’s not even winning the Open Source Microblogging Platform war – as Identi.ca has grown slightly while Jaiku declined.
Meanwhile, Google has listed the 46 official accounts it has on Twitter.

And in the meantime, we’ve seen the rise of Twitter clients such as Tweetdeck, internal microblogging such as Yammer,  the blend of micro and macro blogging in Tumblr and Posterous, and video and audio blogging with the likes of 12 seconds and Audioboo. Not forgetting the lifestreaming element of the likes of Friendfeed.

And although we talk about forums, blogs and Web 2.0 social networks as if they’ve reached the endpoint of their evolution, there’s still a lot more to come from them – I’d say the social elements of the web aren’t even 15% of what they’ll become in the next 10 years.

The question is how you as a person, you as a company, or you as a developer can find clarity through it all…

(There is also the question fo what Google were thinking re: Jaiku, and how it’s managing to miss out on the rise of Open Source as much as it did on the rise of microblogging – after all, the platform itself doesn’t appear to be the cause)

Mashable misses something in the Posterous vs Tumblr showdown

By

I’ve long been a fan of Mashable amongst the top tech blogs, and this comparison of the Tumblr and Posterous services goes some way to explaining why.

They combine news with good in-depth analysis of services to show what exactly you might want to use them for – and in general this article is pretty good.

It does have one major, major, major omission, though, which is so obvious as to appear almost intentional.

When Jennifer Van Grive details the autoposting options Posterous offers, she writers:

‘a single Posterous video post could auto-post to Twitter, Facebook , YouTube and Vimeo and blog sites, while photo posts could automatically add images to your Flickr, Facebook, and Picasa accounts.’

What she doesn’t make clear is that Posterous will actually autopost to Tumblr.

That’s a major advantage to Posterous, and certainly a major element for discussion in a ‘head-to-head’ comparison.

And as you can see, it’s something I’m playing around with at the moment, with my Posterous blog, and my Tumblr blog linked.

Is Posterous taking Tumblr’s easy blogging crown?

By

When it comes to 140 character microblogging, Twitter has established itself as the leader. In hosted blogging, Blogger leads the way. And if you’re hosting your own blog, then WordPress is the most common choice (as used for this blog!)

And until recently, the clear choice for someone who wanted more space and multimedia than 140 characters, but didn’t want a ‘full-on’ blog was Tumblr. I set up my own Tumblr blog fairly quickly and didn’t really develop it much, but good friend Angus has taken it a bit fair bit further.

But all that seems to have changed recently, as Posterous has launched a full scale attack of features, and has already inspired Steve Rubel to write about how the microblogging/lifestreaming approach has changed the way he blogs.

While Tumblr has introduced a popularity ranking system, Posterous appears to be everywhere. Recent updated include becoming an alternative to posting images on Twitpic and a way to turn email lists into group blogs.

Now you can import your blog to Posterous from any of the major publishing platforms – including Tumblr.

And upload video from the Apple iPhone 3G S to multiple social sites, including Twitter and Facebook.

Posterous seems to be benefitting from the ‘posting by email’ side of the site, which makes it an easy and effective way to get content online. Although Tumblr has a similar feature, it’s far less prominent when you’re comparing the services at face value. And Posterous is also targetting the distribution of that content, which is something Tumblr doesn’t seem to be doing as much. It’s very much in the vein of Twitter and Friendfeed in making it quick and easy to create, aggregate, and share.

(I’m also available on Posterous, but I’m only just starting to use it).

In fact, the only killer feature that both sites are missing is the one that I firmly believe has kept Blogger popular in the face of WordPress.com, and also Tumblr/Posterous – the ability to quickly and easily install Google Adsense adverts on a hosted platform. It’s not the sole reason for someone choosing to blog, as we always like to focus on the desire for self-expression, but it’s an important issue for a lot of people. Even if common sense suggests hardly anyone will make any significant revenue, the hope factor is as important as in buying a lottery ticket!

If I ran Tumblr right now, I’d be introducing a similarly quick and simple Adsense system to Bloggers as quickly as I could!

Start growing your business today Contact Us