Techcrunch interviews Matt Mullenwag of Automattic/WordPress, which bought Tumblr for a song after a succession of corporate owners let the billion-dollar blog platform decay into a bleak ritual of itself. Work has progressed on reviving the vibe, and now he hopes it could be a better Twitter than Twitter.
In this episode, he talks about why it's important to keep all of these platforms open source and how he thinks Tumblr could begin to compete with Twitter.
I'm not done listening to the interview, but it's great to hear someone advocate so eloquently and forcefully for open-source licensing. He points out something interesting about Tumblr, that it's the unsung source of many features now copied by all other social networks. And he understands that it is the place where publishing and distribution came together on the web.
Still, there's an interesting advantage Twitter has over Tumblr: you can post adult material on Twitter. I don't think this is a trivial observation. Twitter is censored by Twitter, Tumblr is censored by banks. It can't beTumblr anymore, let alone Twitter.
