The second half of October was a pretty busy one for me. I ploughed through three articles for designboom, two of which are up now. I have also been twittering more, thanks to twitterific and I haven’t really had much to talk about here. One of the reasons I have been at a loss for words is because I have become mildly obsessed with tumblr. So I thought I would use this opportunity to expand on the subject and also discuss the intended versus their actual use of products and services.
The first thing that I wanted to mention about tumblr is the stages of use. Since I first opened up my account earlier this year, I wasn’t quite sure what tumblr was for. My first impression was that it culminated different feeds in one spot, a la FriendFeed. So I hooked up my last.fm, flickr, delicious and every other feed I had. I soon faced a giant list of songs that I listened to, without the value-added features of last.fm, itself. then, a few months ago I started over. I had seen a few more tumblr pages in the wild and wanted to approach the platform differently. I deleted my account and started fresh. At this point I wanted to begin experimenting with using tumblr as a micro-blogging platform, something more akin to its intended use. I soon became addicted to this approach, adding multiple things everyday. One of the key reasons this worked better for me was the bookmarklet that allows you to quickly add to your tumblr. Simply adding a photo or quote to my tumblr is a breeze with this tool. My tumblr is now looking like a record of what occupies my time online, creating a digital scrapbook or timeline if you will. I haven’t looked back since.
Except the truth is that I have, thanks to tumblr’s archive. With a blog, you can go back in time and look at what you were thinking about a particular point in time. the tumblr archive allows you to look back at what you were seeing online at a given point in time. you can now go back in time to see when you first saw that blog that you now read everyday or the website that you forwarded to all your friends. The continual pace of the web makes it hard to keep track of all this information, but using tumblr to track this provides an interesting perspective on your web history; a digital memory perhaps or maybe a form of internet nostalgia?
The reason I think that this little story is so interesting is because it demonstrates that products, and even more so services, are what their users make them. Much like brands, products and service in the digital age are what their users make them. Twitter jumps to mind as the perfect example. While it originated as one thing, it quickly morphed to suit the needs and desires of its users. One of the reasons I enjoy looking at other tumblr pages so much is that each one is different; each one uses the system in a different way with a different approach. While this is true of blogging, it is immensely evident with tumblr.
As a designer I wonder how this can integrate into the process of designing products and services. Can you truly anticipate how users will use your products? I think that this uncertainty has always and will always be there, but the web has accelerated it, making it more obvious. So is it worth fighting or embracing?
Twitter