(500) Days Of Tumblr

This is a story of boy meets website. The boy, Tom Hansen of Margate, New Jersey, grew up believing that he’d never truly be happy until the day he met “the one”. This belief stemmed from his late arrival to Myspace and a total misreading of the movie The Social Network. The website, Tumblr.com, did not share this belief. It’s a website; it doesn’t have feelings. That would be ridiculous. Tom finds Tumblr on January 8th. He knows almost immediately that it is the website he has been searching for. This is a story of boy meets website, but you should know upfront: this is not a love story.

There’s only two types of websites on the internet: there’s pornography, and there’s everything else. Tumblr.com was everything else. Number of staff: average. Number of accounts: average. Number of hits: slightly above average. For all intents and purposes, Tumblr.com: just another website. Except it wasn’t…

In 2010, a meme on Tumblr involved the lyrics from a B.O.B. song: “Can we pretend that airplanes in the night sky are like shooting stars? I could really use a wish right now.” This spike in iTunes sales of his single “Airplanes” continues to puzzle industry analysts. During last semester, students around the world were so distracted by Tumblr that there was a 12% drop in average grades. And on your round-trip commute to work, you’re likely to pass at least 3 people using Tumblr on their iPhones per day.

It was a rare quality, this Tumblr effect. Rare, and yet something every post-adolescent internet user has encountered at least once in their lives. For Tom Hansen to find it now in a world wide web of over 200 social networks, around 115 million websites, and more than one trillion unique URLs - well, that could only be explained by one thing: fate.

To be continued…

Come back to The Bubblegum Gang next week for Part 2 of (500) Days Of Tumblr.