Tumblr Adds Features, Social Components

The micro-blogging tool Tumblr recently rolled out some solid improvements to their platform that make it much more complete and interactive.

First up is the redesigned dashboard on your Tumblr page within which you will find a tab labeled 'Feeds'. From here you can very easily set up your Tumblr blog to pull in your content from sites like Digg, Del.icio.us, Twitter, Flickr, Last.fm, and YouTube as well as from the other major blogging tools (Wordpress, Blogger, Vox, etc.). To set these up you simply input your user names for these sites and Tumblr pulls in their feeds. You can also manually add any other RSS feed you'd like simply by entering it in a URL field. With so many platforms out there with which you can communicate, its nice to have one that consolidates all your content in a single place.

Furthermore, Tumblr has developed is the ability at add Tumblr friends. Under the 'Settings' tab it reads: "Choose a photo that users see when they add you as a friend." When you visit a Tumblr site, if you are signed in, you will see an 'Add as a friend' button in the upper right hand corner. Click this and the author will be added to your friend list in your dashboard. From here you can easily follow their updates.

On the mobile front, they've added support for text messages so you can blog from your cell phone as well as add pictures.

They've also added a new 'ReBlog' button to the dashboard that allows you (again, when signed in) to easily re-post something interesting you find on another Tumblr site to your own site.

One of Tumblr's weaknesses was its lack of commenting as an option for sites. Though they haven't added it yet, they claim to be working on a way for users to interact that "doesn't fall into the same trap that blog comments have". It will be interesting to see in the coming weeks exactly what they mean by this.

Each of these new features improve the service in their own way, but Tumblr has to be careful not to go too far beyond its scope and get too complicated. Many people still prefer a service like Twitter over a more robust one like Jaiku (which also utilizes the feed import), presumably because of its simplicity. That too is a major strength of Tumblr and if they stray too far from it, they will simply enter the crowded realm of regular blogging tools.

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