Tumblr grew explosively in 2010. Its dashboard, a dark blue page of posts from the blogs you followed, made reblogging and animated GIFs the currency of a new creative culture, from fandoms to fashion blogs to single-serving joke sites.
Tumblr's post types (text, photo, quote, link, chat, audio, video) sat in a row at the top of the dashboard. Every post carried a heart and a reblog arrow, and notes counted how far a post had travelled. Custom themes made public blogs look nothing like each other, while the dashboard made following hundreds of them effortless.
The site's growth in 2010 was so fast that a December outage took it down for roughly a day. Tumblr became the home of GIF sets, reblog chains thousands of notes long, and the fan cultures around Glee, Inception and Harry Potter.
- Domain in 2010
- tumblr.com
- Launched
- February 2007
- Founders
- David Karp
- Owner in 2010
- Tumblr, Inc. (private)
- Status today
- Still active
What people used it for
- Short-form blogging
- Reblogging photos, GIFs and quotes
- Fandom and aesthetic blogs
- Anonymous asks
Interface characteristics
- Dark blue dashboard (#2c4762) with white post cards
- Row of post-type icons at the top
- Heart and reblog controls with note counts
- Endless custom themes on public blogs
Notable features
- Reblog with commentary
- Ask box and submissions
- Queue and scheduled posts
- Tumblr for iPhone app
What happened later
Yahoo bought Tumblr for $1.1 billion in 2013. After a 2018 adult-content ban drove users away, it was sold to Automattic in 2019 for a reported few million dollars.
Archived on the Wayback Machine
Archived pages open on web.archive.org (Internet Archive). They are historical captures, not part of this exhibit.
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