for the Digiday Programmatic Marketing Summit, May 6-8 in Palm Springs.
If communicating on Snapchat, Facebook, WhatsApp, LinkedIn, Twitter and other apps wasn’t enough to get your message across, Tumblr is launching its own private messaging tool it said in a blog post today.
Before this, the only way Tumblr users could communicate with each other was by reblogging posts with comments or its clunky and generally hated Fan Mail feature, which is being jettisoned for this. Now users can communicate privately and in real-time with threaded conversations, a feature Tumblr says had been among the most-requested.
Messaging isn’t available to everyone just yet. Tumblr says it’s using a “viral launch” with only 1,500 people getting the tool for now. More users will get it when someone with it messages them, creating a chain effect. (Everyone will have it by early December.)
But does this green earth really need another messaging service? Tumblr founder and CEO David Karp told Wired that, yes, it does because Tumblr’s community is based on strangers sharing similar interests who are looking to start conversations with each other:
“We’re not trying to take on Facebook through Tumblr messaging,” says Karp. “It’s really organized around this community of strangers who are obsessed with the same stuff, and being able to find each other and talk to each other… This should be the central feature, this should be the backbone for all the user-to-user and user-to-group interactions happening on Tumblr.”
That’s different from competitors, like Facebook Messenger, where those communities are built around real-life friendships. Of course, having a complete strangers reach out and touch you is weird, so Tumblr has built-in safety tools, like limiting who can message them, if a user suffers from stranger danger.
For now, Tumblr says users can’t share the lifeblood of Tumblr, a.k.a. GIFs, but it’s working on it for future versions.
More in Media
Digiday+ Research: Publishers apply AI to streamline tasks and improve audience experience
Publishers increasingly embed AI tools into daily functions, especially streamlining tasks and improving the audience experience.
Ozone’s platform tries to simulate how publisher content appears in AI answers
Ozone’s new simulation platform aims to crack AI’s black box to let publishers model how their content gets surfaced in AI answer engines.
CNN builds in-house agent infrastructure as it prepares for AI-driven media trading
In Q3, it plans to test one or two properties to see how they’re interpreted by LLMs, before turning in Q4 to buyer behavior and whether budgets are being allocated toward agent-to-agent trading experiments.