Tumblr Catching Up To WordPress.com

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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).

WordPress Beta Testing GTD Features Upon WP.com

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Automattic (the company behind WordPress) has just rolled out several major features for WP fans that will make a GTD guru (or “Get Things Done”) heart swoon.

You’re writing a post (or a page) in WordPress. You mention something you’ve written about before, and think to yourself, “I’m going to link to that last post!” What do you do? You might open a new tab and search for the older content in your dashboard’s list of posts, or you might go to your live blog and find it. Either way, you have to find that content and get the URL, so that when you click on the link button in the post editor, you’ll have it ready. Right? What’s that, 5-8 steps, depending on which way you do it? No more!

With our sexy new internal linking feature, you can now enter any URL to create a link just like you used to, OR you can search your existing posts and pages right there in the link popup. A combination of pre-loading, autocomplete, and some ajaxy goodness make the new link creation tool a joy to use (and man, that popup is so much faster!). We hope this addition spurs you to make more connections between pieces of content on your site, which will make it easier for your visitors to find more related content from you. One more time, all together now: Yay! (Right?) (Official WordPress Blog)

Along with the upcoming Tumblr-like features, the internal linking and page features will be making their way to version 3.1 which will hopefully be arriving by Christmas of this year. [Read more…]

WordPress.com Vs “I Control My Site” (Which Is Better?)

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Of all the WordPress hosting companies that I’ve tested, I have yet to come across one that could potentially challenge Automattic for the WP crown–until now.

Going by the name of I Control My Site, this company has the potential of challenging Automattic by offering users more freedom with their WordPress blogs at the low cost of free (note: this only applies to their Lite plan).

Publicly unveiled in August of 2010, I Control My Site presents users with an inexpensive alternative to WordPress.com that is in many ways similar to Automattic due to its custom admin interface as well as its “social” UI that allows one to send a “friend request” to users within the community.

While I Control My Site does offer users the ability to upgrade their accounts in order to take advantage of extra features (such as email, FTP, more space, etc.), users who enjoy blogging under a sub domain for free may want to check out I Control My Site before making any commitments to WP.com. [Read more…]

WordPress.com Partners with PicApp

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PicApp is a service that lets you embed legal images on your site, and now you can do it with a shortcode on WordPress.com as well. There’s a demo video in the WordPress.com announcement post, and another one on the PicApp blog. There’s also a plugin for stand-alone WordPress users, which is nice obviously.

Oh, and while we’re at it, WordPress.com got a revamped theme viewer as well. You might want to check that out too.