Sharing posts to Facebook via Tumblr is now a “billion times” easier as Tumblr has announced its integration with Facebook Timeline. Now, Tumblr posts will appear on your Facebook Timeline, News Feed and Ticker when you chose to “send to Facebook.” This will also include Tumblr likes and replies, which will automatically appear on Facebook as well.

The world’s fastest growing blogging platform has friended Facebook, using the social networking giant’s Open Graph API to allow for post sharing via Facebook Timeline, News Feed and Ticker.

The new options included are -

• Toggle “Send to Facebook” when posting
• Share Replies on your Facebook Timeline
• Share Likes on your Facebook Timeline

Tumblr users can start using these new options, which are available in their blog settings. Users can adjust the setting to share posts on their Facebook Timeline.  If you’ve already linked your Tumblr account with Facebook, then you’ll get a notification that says, “We’ve improved Facebook sharing. Upgrade now.”

How to Integrate Tumblr with Your Facebook Timeline Profile

• If you were already integrated with Facebook through Tumblr’s App, then you should see an update prompt once you log in to Tumblr (We’ve improved Facebook sharing. Upgrade now).
• If you were not yet “connected” to Facebook, Go to Blog Settings >> Check the option “Share posts on your Timeline”

How to Integrate Tumblr with Your Facebook Timeline Page

• Go to Blog Settings >> Check Share posts on your Timeline.
• After you log in to Facebook you will see a message that says – “Tumblr would also like permission to: Manage your pages, Tumblr may login as any of your Pages, including (a list with your Pages). Click on Allow.”
• Now, Go Back to your Tumblr and go to Blog Settings >> Scroll Down until your find the Facebook Option. You will now see a few more options, including a drop down menu, from which you will be able to choose which page (or profile) you will send your posts to.

The integration is completely optional, so users are not forced to open up their posts to Facebook. In the meantime, this integration with Facebook means a lot to Tumblr. The integration with Facebook will result in more referral traffic for Tumblr blogs. Tumblr hopes that users will auto share their posts in order to fetch more traffic through the social networking giant. The more contents shared the better traffic Tumblr will receive.

It’s a very smart move by the two sites, especially Tumblr. Several businesses that are using Facebook’s Open Graph apps have reported that the amount of traffic brought in by Facebook is getting better day by day, giving them an insight into user engagement within the social network.

Tumblr recently achieved a 20 billion posts milestone with more than 50 million blogs. It now hopes that many new blogs will be created with many new posts, including shares from friends without messing up Facebook pages with auto-updates.

Google Everywhere

It is hard to go online today without touching one or more Google products or services. If it is not search, it may be email, YouTube, Blogger, Picasa, Docs, or Calendar. Google has truly blanketed us with their web-based app offerings. Heck, even the Google Doodle is a conversation topic!

In this editorial, I shall discuss how you can kick the Google habit, what I am using now as alternatives and why you probably won’t be able to replace certain Google products today. Ready to move away from Google? First, some background.

Why un-Google?

Some of the reasons I personally decided to look for alternatives:

• Google became a part of virtually everything I did online. I used GMail, Google Reader, Google Finance, Blogger, Picasa, Picasa Web, Google Docs, Google Search, Google Calendar and Google Maps. I felt uncomfortable putting such a large portion of my online life in Google’s hands.
• Google morphed from the cool little startup building fun stuff for consumers, to a dominant public company whose revenues essentially came from just one product. That’s the key most (96%) of its revenues (and profits) came from search advertising. In other words, it needed other ways to make money. The most obvious way to do so would be to extend the arm of advertising, their main revenue-generating product, into other products. I realized I was the merchandise.
• Google seemed to get Apple and Facebook envy. Apple was growing rapidly across all their product lines and at very high profit margins, and Facebook was taking eyeballs and key talent away from Google. This led to some bad attempts to mock Apple and Facebook publicly, which of course delighted the Google developer and enthusiast community but came off as being negative to me. If you make a great product, you don’t need a negative campaign.
• Aside from philosophy, some of the competing products started becoming better, and Google’s products started getting worse (more on that within my descriptions) prompting me to start Project Un-Google which was an effort to use fewer and fewer Google products, hopefully reaching a point where I did not depend on any Google product at all.

Whether it is for philosophy, or hedging your web app bets, it is good to know there is life outside Google when it comes to products and services online and offline. There is usually a strong resistance to change, especially if you have a long history with a product. There is a high cost for transferring the old stuff, and learning your way around a new product/service. However, these challenges are not insurmountable, and I hope you take a look at some or all of the products I list here as an alternative to Google. If you have ideas of other products I may not have mentioned, please let me know!

Popular Google products

Here are some of the Google products/services I will be comparing to competition:

• Search
• Picasa
• GMail
• Calendar
• Documents
• Groups
• Finance
• Blogger
• Chrome
• Maps/Directions
• Talk/Chat/Voice

I realize Google has many more products, appsand services, but I did not look at products like Book Search which are very niche. My attempt here is to look at the commonly used products and services only.

Tumblr, the popular micro-blogging service just announced that it has crossed 250 million page-views per day. This is definitely big for the micro-blogging service which has seen several ups and downs in the past, including a fight with Anonymous and a very long downtime they suffered due to a database crash.

Tumblr’s growth has been phenomenal and they have managed to do more page-views than Posterous and more recently WordPress, though that might have changed now. However, the service is far from perfect and users are frequently greeted with a message saying that “Tumblr is down for some reason or the other” every now and then.

Tumblr though has managed to overcome several of their infrastructure problems to consistently grow over the last few months. For example, they grew from around 20 million views a day to 250 million views in less than a year. That is almost a 500% growth. Additionally, they have grown more than twice since October 2010.

Tumblr will definitely be happy about these stats, but I hope that they are taking very good care of their infrastructure too as it is really annoying to see that the site is not working when I visit them.

Google’s free blogging platform and competitor to WordPress, Blogger, might be one of the biggest source of spam websites and douche bags who leech our hard written work, but it surprisingly has a 100% uptime record in tests conducted over two months by Royal Pingdom.

In a new report released today, the folks at Pingdom tested several blogging platforms including Blogger, WordPress.com, TypePad, Tumblr and Posterours. Surprisingly they left out Drupal from their tests.

Nevertheless, according to their test results, the Blogger platform had the best uptime, which was 100% and was followed by WordPress and TypePad. The worst service was Tumblr, who have been facing some terrible downtimes due to database crashes and 4Chan rage. Over a period of two months, Tumblr was down for over 47.5 hours, their database outage itself had lasted for more than 24 hours.

WordPress and TypePad did have downtimes too, but they had fairly good uptimes at around 99.99%, so most of the downtimes were negligible. On the other hand Posterours were down for 2.1 hours in the past two hours, which is not bad considering that they are seeing a huge influx of casual bloggers posting there.

Overall, Blogger was the winner, however, the amount of spam out there is really concerning. One of the major reasons why you see more spam on Blogger is because unlike WordPress, free Blogger accounts can use advertisements on their websites. Hopefully, Google should work more towards cleaning up the spam on their property, after all they do that all the time for Google Search.

Recent downtimes may have people thinking that Tumblr is a not-good-enough blogging platform. But they’ll be surprised to know that Tumblr brings in more page views then the otherwise most popular blogging network WordPress. According to a recent report by ReadWriteWeb, Tumblr brings in a total of 3 billion page views per month compared to a mere 1.4 billion page views of WordPress.

This does not however, is  proportional  to the number of visitors each network gets. Compared to 500 million unique visitors of  WordPress, Tumblr only gets 48.5 million unique visitors each month. WordPress also hosts a massive 30 million blogs compared to 11 million of Tumblr.

So what do these numbers tell us? WordPress may be a more popular choice for serious bloggers, but Tumblr is easy enough both for publishers and visitors that it generates much more page views. Amongst all these metrics, page views is one of the most important as it is almost directly relates to revenue. This also may be the reason why Tumblr is seeing an increased influx of VC money. The most recent round raised $30 Million for Tumblr and one of the most noteworthy facts about this funding is that a big chunk of it comes from Sequoia Capital, the VC firm behind Google, Apple, YouTube, PayPal and Zappos. When you get a name like Sequoia Capital backing your business, you are definitely doing something right.

After an extended outage of almost a day or more, Tumblr is finally back up and kicking. The site though is not fully functional and seems to be coming up gradually.

So if you haven’t had a chance to post cute kitty pictures in the past 24 hours, you will get to do it pretty soon. You might also want to follow @tumblr on Twitter to get the latest updates from them.

The recovering database cluster is online and healthy. We’re incrementally opening up access to blogs while monitoring performance. (@tumblr on Twitter)

(Source: SAI via Techmeme / Image via Photobucket)

Tumblr, the blogging platform, has been down for at least last two hours and counting. The downtime error originally only appeared when new users tried to sign up or log into their dashboard (the Tumblr homepage was working fine) but after a few minutes the whole network collapsed.

An hour ago they finally issued a public statement via their Twitter account:

We’re working quickly to recover from a major issue in one of our database clusters. We’re incredibly sorry for the inconvenience.

This is the message one gets when trying to log onto tumblr:

It is a quite  embarrassing  state of affairs for a web service that is ranked amongst the top 50 in the world and is becoming increasingly popular as a medium of expression. As a tip, if you ever want to check whether a website is really down, http://downforeveryoneorjustme.com is a great tool to do so. The tool, as of now, confirms that Tumblr is down for every one.

If you haven’t been following the news today, you might have missed a exciting one where both 4Chan and Tumblr were planning to take each other down. If you really missed it, head over to Techmeme to catch up on the news. 4Chan which has a notorious anonymous board at /b/ have been part of numerous takedowns in the past using DDoS.

Recent examples of 4Chan takedowns have been RIAA and MPAA, the agencies which enforce copyrights on behalf of the music and movie industry. However, it looks like 4Chan met their match today in the form of Tumblr, with both of them promising to take down each other.

The end result is for all to see. Both 4Chan and Tumblr are down and it looks like that they have both lost in this battle. Earlier 4Chan attacks have been largely anonymous and hard to detect, but this attack on Tumblr was pre-meditated and publicly known. This is why Tumblr users retaliated and bought down 4Chan too.

In the end, these types of attacks are really not worth it and will just make the internet more inaccessible to everyone. Imagine the millions of regular users of Tumblr and 4Chan who will not be able to access their services thanks to the feud run by people who aren’t even concerned about them.

In the end everyone is a loser, including both Tumblr and 4Chan users themselves.

(h/t @manan)

Tumblr and Posterous have fought a tough battle over the last few years for supremacy in the short-blogging service. Each one tried to attract users with more features. However, now the battle is nearing its end and Tumblr stands at a much better position.

Considering the fact that even as I started my short-blog a few days ago, I chose Tumblr over Posterous, I am happy to be with a better service. My idea of Tumblr and the notion about Posterous (which eventually cancelled it off my choice list) was developed after a simple opinion search on Google. Almost everyone prefers Tumblr to Posterous. Put simply, my point here is, Tumblr had won long before I or Richard MacManus at the  ReadWriteWeb covered this.

The view has already been shared by a co-author here at Techie-Buzz, Tehseen Baweja who correctly predicted the scenario some months ago in  this coverage.

Tumblr lost a considerable amount of customers when Posterous came into existence and lured them away. ReadWriteWeb’s coverage shows Compete and Quantcast stats as considerable proof of the fact. So, the question here is, what made Tumblr stand the tides of time and survive?

Tumblr has the advantage of being the first name in the field. This allowed it to start the show and many corporate brands started their blogs on Tumblr. The unique features of Tumblr was viewing and commenting on friend blogs from the dashboard. This allowed Tumblr to socialize its blogs and build a network around them all.

When combined, it created a perfect blend of things you would want to do on a blogging service like WordPress as well as on a microblogging service like Twitter.

Tumblr might be the next big thing and now is the right time to join it. You can also also setup Tumblr on your personal domain and this  desktop client makes using Tumblr a lot easier.

(Image credit)

Tumblr is nothing new; it has been around for a few years now and has gradually increased in popularity as a feature-rich yet quick blogging platform. However, something that has significantly changed for Tumblr in past few weeks is the entry of a number of traditional media giants.

After utilizing Facebook and Twitter for social media marketing and real-time interaction with users, lots of large newspapers, magazines and TV shows have created a Tumblr blog. Included in the list are Newsweek, NewYorkTimes, TheNewYorker, Life Magazine, Rolling Stone, The Travel Channel and even The Today Show. So are these prestigious media outlets really seeing something unique and useful in Tumblr as a platform or are they just trying to make an early entry in what they are guessing to be the next big thing?

One of the most important reasons for Tumblr’s popularity is the casual and easy-to-use platform, something which is really useful for an average user but is hardly important for a big organization with lots of resources. The only thing that makes Tumblr unique from other blogging platforms are the interactive features that let users follow other users and quickly re-post their content. Given the popularity of the following phenomenon seen at Twitter, these large organizations are probably convinced that Tumblr is going to raise in popularity over time and even if it doesn’t come close to Twitter and Facebook, it will probably be the next best thing.