We love change here at Doejo. Updated Facebook, revamped Twitter, Google +, why not? With publishing platfroms and social media, the updates may take some getting used to but sooner or later everyone’s on board. Especially when you can Instagram a pic that goes on Facebook, which in turn sends a tweet via Twitter… yay integration harmony! And most of the staff has Tumblr and Instagram microblogs (as if we don’t get enough of each other at work), so we appreciate a good interface.
But when it seems one publishing platform is depreciating another, that’s when we get upset.
Case in point: When you used to post a photo to Tumblr (And Phil loves his Tumblr) it would automatically publish to your Facebook newsfeed. With the new Facebook “Timeline” feature, it groups all your Tumblr posts, minimizes them, then buries them deep down in your feed. What gives?
To the right is a screenshot of Phil’s Facebook wall—see how far down his Tumbl’s are? They’re all grouped together with a generic URL (not even the text that accompanies the images.) And to top that off, according to his analytics, 53 percent of his Tumblr visits are from Facebook—well, they used to be. Below, you’ll see Phil’s Tumblr visits drop dramatically. You’d think this would be an easy fix given all the brainpower at Facebook, unless it’s deliberate… [Shifty eyes.]
What has us scratching our heads even more? The error message on Tumblr’s Facebook app site reading: “Sorry, the application you were using is misconfigured. Please try again later.” As if Tumblr’s some obscure platform Facebook can’t be bothered to accommodate.
An interesting observation from Business Insider:
The new Facebook Timeline profile view isn’t just a visual revolution for Facebook profile pages. It’s a conceptual move that defends it against visual blogging platforms like Tumblr which are becoming social networks unto themselves.
No longer is your profile page a list of posts and links. It’s now a collage of sorts, almost like a Tumblr blog. And that’s exactly the goal for Facebook.
While people post very different kinds of content on Tumblr and Facebook, the fact remains: personal pages and blogs are becoming more visual and less text oriented.
