Tumblr’s Merry Christmas. It was great to see Tumblr picked up $4.5M in a series B. I love Tumblr and maintain a Tumblelog myself. That said it’s my belief that Tumblr currently has a major shortcoming: how far behind it’s SEO (reach) is relative to WordPress. For example, I would never change this blog to Tumblr because it would devastate my traffic. Because the majority of people who take the time to write and produce online content are looking to *increase* their audience, I see Tumblr as a tough sell to people who understand the issue. Following suit, I would think offering premium feature sets would be a much easier sell to bloggers on WordPress since in many cases WP bloggers actually rely on their blog as an income generator. Tumblr still feels a little stuck in the vanity blog category and I really wonder how much this SEO issue will limit Tumblr’s growth going forward.
…I still love you though Tumblr.
Twitter & SEO. I posted a Tweet two days ago suggesting that Twitter could greatly increase product awareness by allowing for dynamic backgrounds where people could insert HTML. Many people have taken to using their Twitter backgrounds as make-shift profiles since Twitter only allows a profile of 2-3 short sentences. Such a change could have major consequences. People increasingly use their blogs and other online presences as virtual business cards. However people rarely link back to Twitter profiles because they simply can’t list much information about themselves: it’s like handing someone a business card with only your name. If Twitter made such a shift to dynamic backgrounds, more people would link back to their Twitter profiles (rather than say Linkedin or a WordPress blog) and the amount of Google juice would go through-the-roof as a result of increased backlinks.
Startup Onboarding. I have been enjoying playing with Zentact, a new CRM tool that plugs into Firefox. After you upload your contacts, the plugin searches the keywords on the websites you visit and matches them with tags assigned to your contacts. Once a connection is made, Zentatct prompts you to send that person a quick note or link, allowing people to be more proactive about maintining relationships (as opposed to simply ‘relationship discovery’). The problem is that when you have thousands of contacts, manually tagging each one is a royal pain-in-the-ass. I’m wondering when someone will launch a company that simply helps people set up and optimize new accounts with startups (pre-population, customization, tutorials, etc). Anything already exist?
Tiny URL Advertisements. I’m also a big user of Betaworks‘Â short URL service, Bit.ly. Bit.ly got me thinking that it would be easy to do a quick redirect to an advertisement, before redirecting to the site being called. I think if such an Ad was shown for only a half second I really wouldn’t mind. In fact, if the ad was visually stimulating and I was only catching a glimpse of it, I might actually be tempted to click back and engage with the ad…sort of a reverse psychology play.