Although Tumblr does have official apps upon Blackberry, iPhone and Android, they have yet to release an official app for Windows Phone 7.

Unfortunately it looks like a third party developer (by the name of “sefirot”) has decided to cash in on Tumblr’s lack of official presence by naming their app after the micro blogging site.

Although technically the app is called “Tumblr.” (with a period at the end), it’s doubtful that Tumblr’s lawyers are going to let the app pass unchallenged lest users confuse it for the official app (which can easily damage Tumblr’s brand).

While Tumblr doesn’t seem to mind third party developers utilizing their name within an app (which Ad Astra Consulting did with WPTumblr), it is doubtful that they will be thrilled with the idea of someone using their corporate name which is trademarked.

Ironically something similar happened to Twitter last year (although the company quickly changed the name to TwitterKiss later on) and I would not be surprised if Tumblr’s lawyers contact Microsoft in order to have the app removed or renamed before the year is out.

Despite receiving a large amount of investment funds, media attention and massive traffic (which resulted in a major outage earlier), Tumblr has for the most part focused on growth rather than formulating a business plan.

However after a Tumblr employee revealed the companies plans on helping users find relevant sites, some are wondering whether the company will consider advertising via promoted blogs (sort of like Twitter’s promoted tweets) in order to help bring in more revenue for the micro blogging platform.

This is pretty cool in and of itself, but something tells us this might be the start of a new advertising play from Tumblr. After all, the Tumblr blogs that are highlighted in these channels are going to get a slew of new followers. And the companies that are increasingly starting Tumblr blogs to market themselves want to get more followers for their Tumblr blogs. So it would make sense for Tumblr to sell some spots in these channels (with all disclosures, of course). (Business Insider)

Even though this idea would help the micro blogging site bring in some revenue (among other ideas), truth be told Tumblr has for the most part avoided advertising of any kind (although users can insert their own ads upon their sites for free).

Currently Tumblr makes most of its revenue through selling premium themes as well as for listings within its blog directory, although the latter users can obtain for free if their sites become popular enough.

While the idea of promoted blogs probably makes sense on paper, it’s still unclear how users would react to marketers attempting to “invade their space” (which could result in a backlash from users).

Either way hopefully the company can find a way to generate some revenue in the not-to-distant future, especially since Tumblr may be one of the few platforms that can actually combat the decline of blogging as a whole.

After dethroning Typepad in order to secure the bronze, it looks like Tumblr rise continues unabated as the company has revealed just how large the Tumblr universe is.

This has been an incredible year for Tumblr. What started as a fun experiment has grown into one of the largest networks on the web, serving billions of views across more than 11 million blogs.

It’s an unparalleled privilege to spend every single day building a product used by so many extraordinarily talented people. We are constantly in awe of your creations and projects, your communities and thoughtfulness. Every person on our team has been moved by this community in one way or another.

Nonetheless, all of this new attention has led to some serious growing pains over the last few months. (Tumblr Staff Blog)

Tumblr’s fast growth has come at a painful price, as the site was previously down for over 24 hours after the team attempted to update their servers in order to deal with the extraordinary growth of the site.

Tumblr’s 11 million blogs puts them within striking distance of WordPress.com, who currently boasts over 15 million blogs (although if include self hosted blogs that number balloons to over 32 million).

As far as traffic goes, WordPress.com is destroying Tumblr according to Compete.com and Quantcast, which may indicate that WP.com is much better at SEO than its micro-blogging rival.

While Automattic (the company behind WordPress.com) assimilation of Windows Live Spaces should help put some distance between the two platforms, 2011 could be the year in which Tumblr jolts ahead of WP.com (at least as far as the number of blogs go).

In the movie The Social Network Jessie Eisenberg, starring as Facebook CEO/Founder Mark Zuckerberg discovers that his business partner Eduardo Saverin has taken all the money from their business account, Mark becomes angry when he realizes that server payments could be missed, resulting in site downtime, which leads Mark to explain to Eduardo that Facebook is the site that “Never” goes down and that their users expect that type of service. I bring that scene up because the Tumblr team must be kicking themselves after just coming back online from a 24 hour downtime hiatus caused by server issues.

While the exact cause of the issue which occurred during a scheduled maintenance period has not been released, Tumblr team members have mentioned “database cluster issues” as a culprit.

Tumblr does appear to be taking everything in stride, mentioning that downtime is an issue that startups have to deal with when working on a shoestring budget with a small team of tech minded individuals. According to their blog, the upgrade was “more work than our small team was prepared for.” read more

As many of you are very aware of, Tumblr (the micro-blogging platform that put the fear of reblogging into Typepad, WordPress and LiveJournal) has been down for almost 20 hours.

The company has thus far suffered one of the worst outages in social blogging history, worse than most (if not all) of the fail whales that plagued Twitter back in the day.

While Tumblr will eventually resurrect the site back from the brink (as they have plenty of cash to hire extraordinarily engineers and purchase more servers), here are a five things users can do when Tumblr resurrects Tumblr. read more

It looks like Tumblr fans upon Windows Phone 7 have another reason to rejoice as a third party company has created an unofficial app for Microsoft’s latest smartphone.

Simply titled WPTumblr, the app was created by Ad Astra Consulting which allows users to reblog, like and catch up on Tumblr blogs that you subscribe to (aka follow).

Thus far the Windows Phone 7 app supports all 7 Tumblr formats and allows users to upload images, although unlike the official Android, iPhone and Blackberry brethren, Ad Astra’s app does suffer from one critical flaw.

New Post Page screen capture.  WPTumblr supports all seven native post types.  Currently you can only submit music/videos via URL since the WP7 framework doesn’t allow direct access to your music or video libraries. (Official WPTumblr Blog)

Ironically this limitation may convince Tumblr (the company) to wait until Windows Phone 7 matures a little bit before creating an official app (as all of Tumblr’s official mobile apps support video uploading).

Currently Ad Astra Consulting is selling WPTumblr for $0.99 within the Windows Phone Marketplace, and as far as I can tell they are the first company to launch a blogging platform for WP7 (note: WordPress is rumored to be working on an app for the platform as well).

Unlike Squarespace who was very upfront regarding how much cash they were able to raise from investors, the micro blogging company is being rather quiet regarding the size of their latest investment.

Tumblr has raised a “very big and competitive” round of financing from top Silicon Valley VC firm Sequoia Capital, we’ve learned. [...]

The NYC-based blogging startup’s founder David Karp and president John Maloney went out to the Valley looking for money last month, and it sounds like they came back winners. (Business Insider)

Despite lacking a strong business model (outside of premium themes and listings that is), Tumblr’s interest from investors is probably due to the micro blogging site’s skyrocketing rise (at the expense of Typepad nonetheless).

The company also boasts a high retention rate for users (up to 80%), with the site is quickly gaining the attention of celebrities, one who (more or less) ditched Twitter and asked his followers to embrace Tumblr instead.

Tumblr thus far has declined to publicly disclose the size of the investment (although we will update the post if we hear any figures), although whatever the figure it should be enough to keep the lights on long enough for the company to figure out a way to become profitable in the not so distant future.

Following the footsteps of WP.com (which is owned by Automattic), it looks like WordPress core developers will be releasing version 3.1 which will allow self hosted fans everywhere to create mini tumblr blogs without having to purchase (or download) a custom theme.

The current list of post formats is on the Codex page: http://codex.wordpress.org/Post_Formats.

aside – Typically styled without a title. Similar to a Facebook status update.
chat – A chat transcript.
gallery – A gallery of images.
link – A link to another site.
image – A single image.
quote – A quotation.
status – A short status update, usually limited to 140 characters. Similar to a Twitter status update.
video – A single video.

There has been suggestion of an “audio” format, which makes sense given the other multimedia posts. Another one recently suggested to me was a “code” format, which I could get behind. (WordPress Development Updates)

Core developers are scheduled to release version 3.1 of WordPress by December of 2010, although it is probably safe to assume that they will release the latest version before the holidays (as very few people enjoy working over the break). read more

After surpassing Typepad and forcing WordPress to adopt a simpler approach to blogging, Tumblr’s greatest challenge right now isn’t adding new features, but rather becoming profitable.

Dennis Crowley, co-founder of location-based social network Foursquare, and David Karp, founder of microblogging platform Tumblr, talked about these and other issues here early Thursday in a conversation led by The New Yorker media writer Ken Auletta and organized by the Newhouse School.

While their companies have grown their user bases quickly and they have been developing revenue models, the bottom line is still a developing story. “Not profitable yet,” Karp told Auletta when asked about Tumblr’s financials. “Same thing,” Crowley added. (Hollywood Reporter)

Despite boasting a couple of premium features (such as paying to be listed in the directory and premium themes), Tumblr probably needs to figure out new ways to generate some positive cash flow in order to avoid the fate of Digg.

While the execs at Tumblr probably have numerous suggestions on how they could generate some extra cash on the side, here are a few easy ideas the micro blogging company could consider on the path towards profitability. read more

Tumblr’s dramatic rise has apparently taken a toll on the company’s queue system (aka scheduled posting), and in an attempt to avoid a “fail whale” scenario they’re not only scaling the feature, but promising to wow the world when it relaunches.

Later this week we’re pushing a complete overhaul of the Queue feature with some killer new functionality.

In the meantime though, the existing queue service is handling a volume of posts it was never designed for. To prevent it from becoming unstable and mis-publishing posts, we’ve decided the best course is to take the queues offline and expedite the relaunch. (Tumblr Staff Blog)

Thus far the company hasn’t given any hints as to what the new system will look like, although if I had to guess it might have something to do with solving the international group blog problem (i.e. queuing posts based on a timed countdown rather than a specific time).

Tumblr has thus far not given an estimate of when queued posts will return to the tumblr-verse, although hopefully soon (as manually posting queued posts is not exactly fun).