Tag Archives: Tumblr

Postcards He Gets

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A buddy and former Sciences Po classmate of mine (currently studying at the London School of Economics) runs a very cool Tumblr blog called “Postcards I Get,” in which…well, I think it’s pretty self-explanatory. Here’s a recent description:

Very smart of the Universal folks to go sans explanation back here, although it might have been nice of them to give details on joining Dumbledore’s Army for self defense tips while on campus.  Still, despite a day of rubbing elbows with wizards, Erin survived to tell the tale, so it can’t be all dark arts and deadly forests.  Whatsmore, they seem to have figured out a new method of posting letters!  Sure, that owl holding an envelope looks like a postmark, but…it’s not.  I’ll accept that the nifty Hogwarts stamp is at least semi-legal, but nowhere were any of these stamps officially canceled by the USPS.  How to explain this postcard I got, then, except accepting that it’s magic?

Bonus points: thanks for the clarity as to my status, incongruous stamp theme

Then there were Path, Pinterest, and Highlight: do we have too many social networks?

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First it was Facebook and Twitter. (Or not even “first,” since those products were actually preceded by Friendster, MySpace, et al.) Now it’s Foursquare, Tumblr, Flickr, Pinterest, Path, and Highlight. Social networks are proliferating, but the addition of each new app/network is diluting the quality of the whole social experience.

In some (but not all) ways, social networking is a natural monopoly. The best customer experience is only possible when a large number of people are using the same service. The more fractured the space becomes, the less likely any of your friends are to be using the specific network you prefer. And this makes the entire social experience less valuable — both for prospective social media users looking to get involved for the first time, as well as for existing users looking to expand their digital influence/footprint.

I just downloaded Path on my Android smartphone the other day and, while I must admit that I haven’t spent much time with it, it’s a little unclear to me why anyone should bother using this over, say, Facebook, which already does the same thing (and more) and has the additional value of being used by nearly everyone I know. There is some merit in using multiple online tools — Facebook, for example, has yet to establish a blogging service capable of wooing customers away from Tumblr, WordPress, Blogspot, and the like — but much of today’s social sphere is simply redundant. Foursquare, or Facebook check-ins, or Google Latitude? They all do basically the same thing to varying degrees of success, but the existence of all three of them means that, at any given moment, relatively few of my friends are using any specific one of them.

Of course, the counterargument is that the presence of this competition is the very driver of innovation in the field. This is undoubtably true, and perhaps more importantly, there is no good way (nor would it be a remotely good idea) to force everyone to use a specific service anyway. But it is starting to feel as if the hyperactivity in social media these days is reducing the quality for everyone. I suppose the best we can hope for is that the presence of all these startups will force the big names like Facebook and Google to incorporate more of the best ideas into their own products. That is hardly an ideal free-market scenario, but it may be the best option we have at the moment.

Return of the prodigal blogger

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After a self-imposed month of absence in June and a carryover helping of apathy lasting halfway into July, today I return. (Like Harry Potter, only with less fanfare.) A voluntary writing ban can last for only so long before disintegrating in a cloud of rusty word-dust. I say rusty because I am. Over a month ago I began posting on my new Tumblr feed (as well as significantly stepping up my Twitter prolificacy), and — due to my utter lack of practice elsewhere — I’d never gotten so much enjoyment out of devising captions.

Notwithstanding my two-pronged double-T social networking pastimes (tweeting and tumbling happily along, I did), long-form writing beckoned, and so here I am. In the blogosphere (I hate that word), long-form can actually mean something approaching book-length, but here I only use it to distinguish these missives here from their more concise 140-character counterparts.

By the way, I just discovered that WordPress has added Google’s +1 button as a sharing option for posts now. This brings me to a somewhat related point, which is that my Houdini-like vanishing act from this blog in June precipitated quite a foray into social networking in general. Google+’s launch roughly coincided with my “blogstinence,” and Twitter helped fill that gaping void known as narcissism-deprivation as well. I also recently acquired a Spotify account and have slowly begun reentering the chaotic and mostly annoying world of Facebook. “Hello, world,” indeed.

I can tell this post is going nowhere, so now’s as good a time as any to wrap things up. But suffice it to say that you should expect to see more of me in the very near future, cobbling together spare consonants, vowels, and the occasional exclamation mark toward whatever ends I please — which theoretically could be absolutely anything, and in practice will consist almost entirely of jokes likening Mitch McConnell to a Thanksgiving turkey.

Oh, and one more thing. I’m moving to Paris next month for grad school. My girlfriend is moving to Alaska for a law clerkship just days before. This seems (and is) vaguely ridiculous, but we’re staying together, which isn’t at all. So I would remind you (and by you I refer, of course, to exactly no one) that, if you could forgive my unannounced sabbatical last month, I would kindly thank you to equally absolve me of any sub-par upcoming performances, which will no doubt include fits and starts and the occasional sputtering “I can’t speak the language and I’m going to fail all my classes.” The first part will be true (at least at the beginning), and hopefully not the second.

I have never read Ernest Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast, although I’m about to, but yesterday a former French professor emailed me its opening line as a sort of benediction for the coming year: “If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man,” Hemingway writes, “then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast.”

And with that, I bid you good night.