Get Tumblr on your TV!
The insanely talented guys at Boxee just launched a Tumblr app for your television. We can’t thank their team enough. Go get Boxee and disconnect your cable already.
We love Tumblr at boxee. We thought enabling users to stream music and view slideshows from the people they are following on Tumblr would be a cool experience on boxee, so we worked with them to build it.
We will continue to work with the Tumblr team and you should expect more Tumblr features on boxee soon.
Photo by kapi
New Bar Theater is hosting a very cool meetup in NYC tonight. They’ll be featuring work from some of our favorite Tumblr photographers (including Erin, Paul, Lauren, Chris, Erik, Melissa, and Katie).
Introducing the new Tumblr Directory
We’ve been really inspired by the work of Kevin Rose and his team on their new self-organizing Twitter directory, WeFollow. The premise is simple: Everyone picks up to three tags to describe themselves, and the directory ranks everyone within each tag by their “follower” counts.
The result is an entirely community-organized directory. The problem is follower counts are a boring way to sort people, and rarely let anyone new surface for the community to discover. Which is why we just launched our new Tumblarity stat to quickly bubble-up blogs that are gaining momentum.
So here’s how the new Directory works: If your blog focuses on a particular subject, you can tag it. Blogs are then sorted within each tag by their current tumblarity.
Testing the Directory for the last couple weeks (using some rough filters), we’ve found thousands of interesting blogs we had no idea existed. And the constantly moving tumblarity ranks mean new people are always surfacing.
Please note: We’re leaving this feature in beta until next week. Until then, you can only pick two tags out of our pre-defined list. Afterwards, you’ll be able to use any three tags you define.
Between reblogging, search, Popular Stuff, the Map, and the new Directory, we’re pretty happy with all of the ways to explore and discover interesting people on Tumblr.
Meet Jacob!
I started following Jacob Bijani a little over a year ago when a super unique theme he created caught my attention.
Last summer, we enlisted his help to build some great original themes for some interesting companies that were using Tumblr.
We loved working with him so much, that when we finally met in person last September in his hometown of San Diego, I asked him how quickly he could move to New York.
Two weeks and one sublet later, Jacob joined us as Tumblr’s new Creative Director.
He’s spent his first months overhauling the site to accommodate for all the new stuff we’ll be launching after Christmas.
Jacob’s taken over my old desk, has created these neat pages for sketching out Tumblr layouts, and is the first person we’ve hired who’s younger than me.
We just pushed a newly designed Theme Garden, and we’re working on approving the backlog of (several hundred!) theme submissions. Sorry for the delay.
