Matt Hurst reblogs

7 possible reasons to like Yahoo’s acquistion of Tumblr

Contrary to some users concerns, there are plenty of reasons to be excited for Yahoo’s purchase of Tumblr.  Here’s 7 ideas I can think of how Yahoo could make Tumblr better by leveraging their own tech:

1. More original photography and clearer attribution via Flickr.  It’s easy to see how these two visually-oriented social media sites might work together, especially as Flickr has one of the better tools to share photos on Tumblr already.
2. Better link sharing of Yahoo news content. One of my big pet peeves on Tumblr - unverified rumors spread more readily and don’t get corrected.  Bringing in more professionally written news stories might lead to better conversations in the Tumblr-verse…
3. Sharing chats straight from IM: wouldn’t it be cool (and more transparent) if you could import dialog straight form your IM window straight to Tumblr? Editing/formatting chats is cumbersome in the current version of Tumblr, but Yahoo already has it’s own popular chat service. They could even prompt a user to consent to sharing their discussion on the social site.
4. “Ask me anything” could open up open-questions via Yahoo! Answers (a site which still gets a ton of questions).  Call it “Ask us anything”, and I think it might open up conversations in a way which might be helpful to users.
5. Easier link sharing through Delicious. Too late for this one I’m afraid…
6. Mail/inbox integration.  Not sure if anyone else wants an integrated inbox like this, but I think it’d be helpful to have more unified messaging systems all around, to reduce redundancy and clutter.
7. Just leveraging the web/mobile engineering resources ought to make Tumblr better in the long run.  In my wish list: bigger GIFs, larger image uploads, improved SEO, etc.

Some of these are more wishful thinking on my part, but I’m sure Yahoo put a lot more thought into how Tumblr fits into their overall strategy…