Things to love in Tumblr 3.0

I originally posted this to Squandrous, my tumblelog, this past Saturday, but someone I suggested I post it here as well. Seeing as how I posted my Tumblr wishlist on Eloquation a few months ago, I guess it is fitting I post a follow-up here now. So here goes, my thoughts on Tumblr 3.0 as of last Saturday.

It has been a few days since Tumblr announced version 3.0 of their popular tumblelogging application, and as many of you may know, I use Tumblr to power Squandrous. Because of that, I’ve been very interested in the new features and the progress that has been made in the application to get to version 3.0, and have been playing around with the new functionality for the past few days.

Now that I’ve got a good grasp of the new features of the tool, here are a few thoughts I want to share with you all.

Things I Love

• The new look. Not only is the new design extremely clean and simple, but Tumblr has done what every site should have been doing in the first place: creating websites that are usable on a mobile handset rather than creating a special mobile version of the site.
• Markdown text styling. I do have a tendency to think in HTML sometimes, but I absolutely love editing text on the web in either Textile or Markdown formatting. The ability to use Markdown has increased my posting speeds, allowing me to format complicated posts (like this one) with relative ease.
• Collaboration with Vimeo. As most of you know, Vimeo has been my video sharing tool of choice from the day it launched. I don’t use video much, but when I do, the quick integration between Vimeo and Tumblr will make life much easier.
• Lack of comments. I’m no fan of comments on blogs, so I’m definitely not a fan of comments on tumblelogs. I’m glad the folks at Davidville decided to focus on other features rather than comments in this release.
• Audio player. Now that’s a sexy looking flash audio player. It’s about time Tumblr got audio, and I’m really happy that they implemented it in such a classy way.

Things I Can Learn to Love

• Channels. The idea has promise, and I can already think of some fantastic uses for it. The problem is that nobody is using them yet, and the people I want to use them with aren’t Tumblr users.
• Archives. I’ve been clamoring for archives for a while, and I quite like the way Tumblr has decided to deliver them. It would be nice if they used our custom templates and offered a link back to our homepages though.

Things That Get No Love

• Friend posts in dashboard. I love having my friend posts in my dashboard, but sometimes you just need to hide them to focus on your own posts. Looks like this version of Tumblr doesn’t let you do that.

Things I Would Love If They Make The Next Release

• More granularity over your RSS feeds. I’m not too worried about importing RSS feeds, but I would love to have more control over what gets published in my feed. Specifically, I’d love Tumblr to provide a digest feed: I post several times a day and my feed often gets overwhelming. A daily digest would be much nicer for people who subscribe to my content.
• Post scheduling. The back-dating of posts is a nice touch, but it would be great if I could put a date in the future as well. I’m a huge fan of post scheduling.

I think that’s all for now. All in all, I think the new Tumblr release is absolutely fantastic, and I’m looking forward to taking full advantage of it in the near future.

On an complete aside: Davidville, the makers of Tumblr, also makes one of my favorite web apps ever. Senduit is by far the best way to share large files online with noobs that don’t know a thing about FTPs and things like that.