With Today’s Update, Tumblr Starts To Look More Like A Fully Featured Twitter Than Blogging Platform

In an effort to make its Dashboard a “smaller and more streamlined experience,” the social blogging platform Tumblr is today overhauling the way users create posts on its website. Instead of the larger, full-screen experience which makes writing or sharing content on Tumblr feel more like blogging, the new post screens seem to be taking a page from Twitter in their design.

Throughout the years, Tumblr has positioned itself as a more lightweight form of blogging, which makes the concept more accessible to people. Using Tumblr is not as complicated as setting up a WordPress site, for example, and it’s significantly less difficult than establishing your own domain and hosting it yourself. (Which, yes, kids, people actually had to do back in the olden days of the web).

Today, despite its “blogging” roots, Tumblr’s community reflects media and links, more so than words, however. If anything, Tumblr is the go-to place for sharing amazing photos, memes, and it has even helped propel our newfound love of gifs back into the mainstream consciousness.

These changes, though seemingly minor, better reflect the platform Tumblr has become and is becoming – a site that’s more social network than it is blogging platform. A site that caters to the younger, social sharing crowd, rather than those who grew up with blogging screens that themselves felt like stripped down versions of Word. Instead, these new posting screens are for those who grew up on Google Docs, Twitter and Facebook.

Tumblr says the changes are meant to make the Dashboard a single experience. “Now you’re making posts the same way you’re reading them,” a company rep told us.

That being said, not everyone will be happy with the updates. The posting window has, in some cases, simplified the number of options available to users. For example, no longer does the photo posting page offer a variety of layouts to choose from. (Tumblr says you can drag them around, however).

You can see the changes in the screenshots below. The changes will begin rolling out to all users at 10 AM ET today.

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