I felt the same way when they picked up Desk (formerly Assistly). I have been pleased that they continue to push the product forward since the acquisition.
I'm rooting for App.net, but I highly doubt that the post-Twitter era will simply involve a comparable Twitter replacement.
Personally I believe that the post-Twitter days will involve a shift away from micro sharing towards long form writing and better ways to have discussions with peers.
Personally I believe that the post-Twitter days will involve a shift away from micro sharing towards long form writing and better ways to have discussions with peers.
We have that. It's called blogging, and it came before Twitter. In order for you theory to make sense, you have to explain why people moved to Twitter in the first place, and/or if there is an uptick in blog activity
Blogging is not sharing - blogging is a GET, sharing (in the Facebook or Twitter formats) is a PUT.
To read new posts I'm interested in, I have to remember to bookmark and revisit the blog regularly. I don't have a convenience glance-view of what's new in my personal blogosphere. RSS was intended to solve this, but never really had much mainstream uptake, and I don't suspect it will now either.
The real addictiveness of Facebook and Twitter come from the fact that they are capable of constantly providing you with a stream of interesting content, filtering out that which you don't like and floating up that which you do (the mechanisms for this between Twitter and Facebook are quite different).
Until blogging can have the same thing (tumblr I suppose is somewhat like that, but is still somewhat of a fenced yard for its own community), it won't be the same as sharing in the modern context.
The dashboard is where you primarily view all of the posts from the people you follow on Tumblr. Think of it in terms of what you view on Twitter, all of the Tweets from people you follow plus the ability to send out a new Tweet.
That's a totally reasonable consideration but the revenue model of the host platform isn't always the best indicator of its success or longevity.
LiveJournal & Six Apart have longstanding revenue models but aren't hosting users like the President of the United States or large corporate media entities.
Here is a screenshot example of what a promoted posts looks like in the dashboard - http://cloud.jonathanmoore.com/Dsu4. Users have the option of choosing from several dozen feature options like "buy this", "very special posts", "super proud of this", etc.
Right now it appears to be limited to one highlighted post per day, and with all purchases on Tumblr they give you the option of donating an additional $1 to EFF, Red Cross and Doctors Without Borders.
This is great, thank you very much ! Seems like it will do all the calcs for you soon as you enter the assumptions but what assumptions do I use for my ad revenue based mobile app business, that's my dilemma !?
I have been using this method for nearly a year on various projects and theme designs. The font icon method is incredibly useful when you want to give user the flexibility to change up the color of the icons. Plus, as mentioned using CSS pseudo elements with content should not effect modern screen readers.
One of the disadvantages mentioned in the article is the file size, but it can be drastically optimized. My favorite icon font is Pictos by Drew Wilson (http://pictos.drewwilson.com/). When I use it in a site design I will actually recreate the font file with just the few icons I need, usually 6-8 characters.
To reduce the font file size just load up the icon font in Font Squirrel's font-face generator (http://www.fontsquirrel.com/fontface/generator) and use custom subsetting to specify the needed characters.
Full Pictos Font
EOT (19 KB), WOFF (13 KB), TTF (18 KB), SVG (41 KB)
Total - 91 KB
I would love to, but in our case the two limitations are Internet Explorer 8 (and below) and cross domain limitations for the IE work arounds. The specific projects we're using the Pictos icon font on are being served up from a secondary asset server were we have no ability to add cross-domain policies or .htaccess modifications required for SVG or the .htc fixes.
- Sponsored radar posts (ads)
- Promoted posts (for all users)
- Premium theme shared revenue
- Selling access to data