It’s not you, it’s me. Wait…. IT IS TOTALLY YOU.
It’s been awesome Tumblr, but you’re really starting to rub me the wrong way.
- Tumblarity? Eat me. You don’t give me a rating without qualifying your assessment, or at least you don’t do so without irritating me to no end. I know how it works now (maybe, approximately), but only by reading the research of others. At least give me the option to turn it off so I don’t have to see the numbers if I choose not to. (If you use Greasemonkey, download this script to hide your Tumblarity number)
- The popular posts are starting to suck. This might be because your core audience has changed, but I am much less tempted to check popular posts than I was when it was Radar. If I wanted a cheesy pixellated picture of an animal doing something dumb I could go find some LOLcats.
- That whole queue thing? Failed every time I have tried to utilize it. Thanks. I love coming to my dashboard to find that I have unexpectedly posted twenty something times in the space of a few minutes.
- You hid the link to themes down at the bottom of the page. Maybe not a bad move, UI wise, but it was irritating nonetheless to not be able to find something that I could before.
- Which leads me to this… test your user interface before you release it. There is no reason the navigation links should have changed this many times in the last year. As far as I’ve read, you’re well funded. It’s time to stop playing the struggling startup card. Pony up the green to have usability tests done, test your features extensively before they are released. It will pay off.
- Your bookmarklet is outdated and has become more of a hindrance than a help. It won’t let me choose to queue posts (not that it would be a good idea, considering how well my queuing tests have gone), it won’t give me a drop down calendar or any sort of clue as to what language to use when specifying when to publish, and perhaps the most grevious oversight… it won’t let me control what I am publishing if it decides that it knows better. I know you thought the whole Flickr integration was going to work out like gangbusters, but I resent having a “feature” that I cannot turn off or override unless I visit my dashboard and post manually.
- If you can’t work out the bookmarklet, maybe you could throw together a decent Firefox extension for posting. If Delicious can do it, you can too. You have brilliant people working for you. Put their smarts to work by asking them to put together a truly comprehensive solution for posting to your site. We’ve been waiting.
There are more, but I’m done with this for now. Before you jump all over me for complaining about a free service, let me say this: I fully expect to pay for Tumblr some day. I know that the free ride can’t last forever (at least sans ads) and I think that this service is worth paying for. I have brought in users by the tens, and turned them into true tumblelog addicts, much like myself.
But even an addict can hate their drug, every now and then.
