Yahoo bought Tumblr: now what?

Complains, mostly.

One day you will call up a page on the Internet and read that Braxi bought MogaZik, and think: man, someone got rich. Wonder how that will work. Right now the sentence makes no sense, just as "Yahoo buys Tumblr" would have meant nothing in 1993. So WHAT DOES IT MEAN?

1. Nothing, if Yahoo is smart. At least nothing the users will note. They'll be on the lookout for signs that everything has been spoiled with clueless "corporate" meddling - when Tumblr itself added a small drop-down box that encouraged people to sign up, some users were ANGRY that the aesthetic was being altered on a free site that hosted anything they put up and didn't have ads.

But Yahoo will probably introduce tiny ads - you pay a billion for something, eventually you get around to wondering if it might make you some money. Perhaps they will share the revenue, like Google. Of course, commerce would spoil the purity of Tumblr. Which brings us to . . .

2. PR0N and lots of it. Either they'll let it be or roll out a slow winnow. Which will drive some people to another platform. Like MySpace! Just kidding. No one will ever go back there. It's GeoCities by now.

So far, no changes: Yahoo's CEO said the X-rated stuff can stay.

3. BuzzFeed says "The real Reason Yahoo is Buying Tumblr" is because the young demo doesn't know what it is.

Again, BuzzFeed:

Whereas Google connotes, well, some sort of benevolent omnipotent brain in the sky which is also devoted to "getting it," "it" being every scrap of information about you it can hoover up, but that's okay because they give you stuff and besides, it's like, Google.

People wailed when Instagram was purchased, and vowed to stomp off somewhere else. Few did. Wordpress says70,000 posts were ported to WP since the announcement, but that's really not too much. You leave Tumblr, you have to start all over again - I left Tumblr a few years ago for Posterous, which had some nifty features and boasted better stability at the time, but it was like moving your kiosk from the Mall of America to a stripmall.

Still: why?

To bring all those tumblr users into the Yahoo realm, I suppose - give them all accounts, let them tie their Tumblrs to Flickr for some reason, pipe Yahoo news feeds to their pages, peel them off from Google. Most of all to show the investors that they're cool. How could they not be? They have Tumblr.

Hint: a little Yahoo toolbar at the top of the page is "screwing it up." Don't. Or we're all off to MogaZik.

MISC A Briton goes to the United States and tells what he likes and doesn't like. Do you care? I do. It's a big country and you have to see a big newspaper reinforce the idea that we're nothing buy fat people who can't make tea. Some of the complaints are silly - the coins? Really, the coins. But:

Come back, lad; you'll only find more to love. One of the comments makes a good point, but fails to stick the landing:

As opposed to millions of Britons who make a point of going to Senegal or Thailand every year, and going in-country to find a village where his own cultural preconceptions can be upended? Europe has different cultures, but aside from petty little details like "language" and "food" the countries are liberal democracies with shared Western traditions. Someone from Monaco won't stand on a street corner in Finland shaking with disorientation because everything's so different.

I don't say this to diminish the lessons of travel, but to underscore the first point: you can get a great deal of cultural diversity in this country. Also, this: tell a Parisian he should get out of town more so he could be exposed to more opinions and ideas, and you'll probably be informed that if the opinions and ideas were worth anything, he would have heard them in Paris.

Well.