The Invention of Tumblr

The Invention of Tumblr

                       AJ Zamora

                            Abstract

David Karp is the 30 year old founder of the short-form blogging site, Tumblr. Karp created Tumblr when he was 20 years old.  David Karp was named the ‘Best young tech entrepreneur’ by Business Week and as one of the top 35 entrepreneurs of the world by MIT review. He was born to Barbara Ackerman, a high school teacher and Michael Karp, the television computer. Karp became especially interested in technology and programming at a young age, teaching himself HTML at 11. In 8th grade, he was already designing websites for money. This caused him to drop out of school in order to save time and focus more on his work. Tumblr is part social networking, and part microblogging.  It has been recently bought by Yahoo. Although, Karp still remains as the CEO. People usually post short texts or quick snaps unlike the usual blogging sites. It is a site that encourages users to post original and artistic content. Tumblr allows the users to express more creativity than most social websites. It enables users to follow accounts that contains contents that they enjoy or are intrigued about. Tumblr makes it very interesting for teenagers who are still trying to find out their true identity and are trying to connect with people who have the same opinion or beliefs. In the future, Tumblr might not remain as the property of Yahoo for long because Tumblr isn’t that profitable which Yahoo quickly discovers. Tumblr will also be more high tech and Tumblr’s original staff will continue to come up with new ideas that will be even more beneficial to the users.

    Keywords: creativity, microblog, coding, programming, hightech, marketing

                            Introduction

    Innovate. Innovation is the process of making lives better. It does not matter if it is a small improvement for one or the biggest breakthrough ever for society, it is still a step forward. These innovations have changed and improved the way the people of today live their life. Travelling, communication, and education are only a few of the examples that innovation have changed for the better. The purpose of this project is to educate not only stem students and faculty but also other academies about our current innovators and inventions.

                        Biography of David Karp

    David Karp’s career started at a young age. He grew up on the upper west side of Manhattan. Karp is the first born son of a teacher and a composer. Karp has always been fond of programming and techonology, “He became interested in technology and programming at a young age, teaching himself HTML at 11.” (Eldridge, 2015). David Karp decided to do homeschooling to focus on an internship he got at the age of 15, “ Karp began homeschooling with his mother in order to pursue an internship opportunity with an animation company, Frederator Studios.” (Eldridge, 2015). Through experience and connections at Frederator, he soon secured a position at Urban baby which is a website where parents could ask questions and tips for their child. At age 17, he moved to Japan in order to, “ become immersed in that country’s technology.” (Eldridge, 2015). He eventually moved back to New York and later became the chief technology officer of Urban baby. Urban baby’s site was sold in 2006 but Karp managed to raise some capital to invest in his own consultancy website which he named, Davidville. He continued to run the business and later on hired a programmer named Marco Arment. He continued to build up the business but while Davidville was having some complications, Karp insisted for Arment to assist him in the building of the blogging site he envisioned, Tumblr.

                         About the Invention

    Tumblr is a blogging platform that is described as “microblogging” is a site where the users are encouraged to express creativity and post or share artistic and original content, “In other words, self-expression through collecting pictures of a particular type of thing.” (Rifkin, 2013). Users can post on their boards, follow other bloggers, or search posts by keywords. Tumblr lets bloggers post various content, such as text, photos, pictures, music, videos, links and more. Tumblr does not have a character limit, and because users can see pictures directly on their feed, it is a much more visually engaging experience. Tumblr also has a weak search performance which is very fine with the user base because users prefer a simple search system over a sophisticated search privacy control like Facebook has, “Tumblr provides its users with the oldest privacy-control strategy on the Internet: security through obscurity and multiple pseudonymity” (Rifkin, 2013). Tumblr is so easy to use it turns ordinary people into compulsive sharers. If a user cannot decide whether or not to blog or microblog, Tumblr is the perfect tool for that user.                     

                       History of Social Media

    The world’s first form form of internet is the CompuServe which was created in the 1960’s. Although it got better around the 70’s and UseNet was created in 1979: “By the 70s, networking technology had improved, and 1979’s UseNet allowed users to communicate through a virtual newsletter.” (Hendricks, 2013). It was around 1980’s that computers became more common resulting to social media becoming more prominent. The first distinguishable social media site, Six Degrees was launched in 1997. It allowed users to upload a profile and befriend other users. In 2003, Myspace was born which gave way to popular social medias today. The world’s first microblogging platform or commonly known as ‘tumble blog’ is Anarchaia created by Chris Neukirchen, “Neukirchen’s blog anarchaia, which was described as an "experimental, impressionistic sub-paragraph tumblin' (think obstsalat) [which is German for fruit salad]," was built using Ruby on Rails and edited with Vooly, a template language” (Alfonso, 2013). Marcel Molina was inspired by Anarchaia that him and his friend Sam Stephenson started creating their own tumble blog, Projectionist: