Tumblr Launches

2007

Date: 19 February 2007 · Place: New York City · Figures: David Karp, founder · Marco Arment, lead developer · Tags: Platform, Reblog, Tumblelog 01. Two Weeks Of Code David Karp, twenty years old and based in New York, launches Tumblr on 19 February 2007 after two weeks of focused work with Marco Arment as lead developer. The format is the tumblelog, a stripped-down personal blog optimized for posting images, quotes, links, and video without the friction of a CMS. Within two weeks the site has 75,000 users. By 2013, when Yahoo acquires it for 1.1 billion dollars, it hosts more than 100 million blogs. 02. The Reblog Becomes A Verb Tumblr's central innovation is the reblog. Any post can be reposted to a follower's blog with attribution preserved as a chain, mutated with added commentary or images, then reblogged again. The mechanism makes images travel as native objects rather than embedded links, creating a circulatory system optimized for visual culture. Subcultures form around the affordance: fandom (Superwholock, One Direction), social-justice discourse, aesthetic blogs (vaporwave, seapunk), and the queer reaction-image archive that defines 2010s internet humor. Sources • KnowYourMeme, 'Tumblr' • The New York Times, 'David Karp, the Pied Piper of Tumblr' (12 December 2008) • Marco Arment, 'Tumblr' (marco.org archive, 2007-2010)