Eric Foster, 4th on the Roster

Nothing good comes from using AOL Instant Messenger these days. It’s like a toy, and now that I’m all grown up I must put away childish things. Here’s a list of why it sucks*.

• What’s in a name - I picked a terrible screen name. It’s a combination between Don Corleon and The Frisco Kid. Niether of which I know anything about.

• Who are these people - like Facebook, there was a period when I was adding everyone I came into contact with. So now, I guess because we interned together in 2003, there’s someone who pops up with the username BigSexyCubano.

• Spam - there was a clever bot called “Salmon”. A user with “salmon” in their name would IM me a non sequitur message like “what comes around goes around”. Once you responded the spambot would connect you to another random users and sat back and laughed at the ensuing chaos. **

If you’d like to IM me, you can find me on Skype and Google Chat.

*I take the blame for some of these issues.
**Yahoo messenger spambots are slightly more transparent. I know hotlonelygirl9322 is not real and I’m sure she’s not linking to something I need to see.

I recently ran into some issues that have prevented me from fully endorsing Tumblr as the future of blogging. I’m aware of Tumblr’s metorotic rise in popularity and I hope with their recent injection of funding and new hires they’ll address my concerns. I’ve listed them below.

1. It’s frustrating to realize you can’t delete your first blog because it’s used as your “Primary Blog”, the default blog for posts and the blog name sent to alert blogs you are following them. If you want to make your second blog your primary blog you have to change the name of your first blog to your second and then somehow replace the content. You’ll see below the problems with this workflow.
2. You can’t easily delete anything in bulk. You can manually click through an archived view of your Tumbles but who wants to do that? I would rather have the option to wipe the entire blog clean.
3. You can’t transfer content from one blog to another. Say your first blog was an experiment and the content of your second blog is more focused. So you decide you’d like to migrate content from your second to your first blog. Unfortunately you can’t export/import Tumblr content.
4. Tumblr doesn’t have native comments. I’ve employed the Disqus hack but I think less savvy users will be adverse to taking these steps.
5. Tumblr doesn’t offer any deep analytics. I’d like to know who is reading my blog and what are they reading for personal and possible commercial reasons.

In the end I think Tumblr is aware of these issues and will be addressing them soon, especially #5. I think given their traffic, they will soon realize the demand for analytics and perhaps use it to make money.