I Saw The Coolest Thing Today

So sorry for the quiet month! We’ve been hard at work on the next iteration of Tumblr, and today we’re ready to pull back the curtain and let you play with some new features we’re totally excited about.

Snappy new interface

The first thing you’ll notice is the slick new Dashboard screen. There’s a ton of new functionality coming to Tumblr, and we’ve been meticulous in keeping the interface focused and dead-simple.

Follow your friends

One of our favorite things about the tumblelog form is just how easy it makes keeping up with the people around us. We’ve streamlined this process even more by letting you follow all your friends on your Dashboard.

More mobile

We’ve been thrilled with the amount of mobile activity Tumblr has been seeing since we turned on mobile photo uploads. As of today, you can send text messages to the same address, letting you update Tumblr from anywhere.

ReBlog stuff you love

Tumblelogs are already the easiest way to share stuff you find or create. But next time you want to share something you find on another tumblelog, just ReBlog it. ReBlogging let’s you quickly share content you discover on other tumblelogs, and even add or change the commentary.

When you’re logged into Tumblr, the ReBlog button is displayed on permalink pages and friends’ posts on your Dashboard.

What’s still missing?

Plenty. This is still only a tiny bit of the vision, and we still have lots more to launch over the next few weeks. A few pieces that are noticeably absent:

• More ways to find friends - It seems like a no-brainer to show friends of your friends, but we have some interesting tools for this that aren’t quite ready uncover. More ways to discover tumblelogs are right around the corner.
• Two-way communication - We hear you! And believe me, this feature is just as important to us. It’s been a lot of work to build an innovative system that doesn’t fall into the same trap that blog comments have. We’re on to something really cool, and we promise you’ll be playing with it soon!
• More ReBlog feedback - ReBlogging gets really cool when we start tracking the life of stuff you post on Tumblr. Imagine following your photo as it’s shared across thousands of users, always pointing back to the creator, while mapping the web of users along the way.

And some bugs fixed

Notably:

• The Write API is no longer failing to create photos in certain instances.
• PRE tags should no longer be seeing extra new-line entities in their markup. (Thanks Tim Lucas!)

So what do you like? What don’t you like? What are you excited about? And what do you absolutely need to see make it into the next update?

As always, your support has been immeasurable. The feedback from this rapidly growing community has been absolutely inspiring, and we are so excited to continue developing Tumblr with you. Thank you!