Ben HalpernIn case you hadn't read the news, Verizon sold Tumblr to Automattic. Verizon owned Tumblr after it acquired Yahoo! and Automattic is the company behind Wordpress.
The price was around 3m, a remarkable fall from the 1.1 Billion that Yahoo! paid just a few years ago. I assume part of the reason it was so cheap is that the ongoing maintenance costs of Tumblr might be large enough that it's a liability in and of itself and somebody needed to take it on. It's why cities will sometimes unload an old warehouse for $1 to someone willing to fix it up and incur the costs.
With all of this known, I'm curious if anyone has any thoughts about the future of Tumblr, as it's now owned by huge open source proponents.
Matt Mullenweg's blog post made vague mentions of plans:
In the underlying technology of our platforms, I think there are some good opportunities to standardize on the Open Source WordPress tech stack, but the front-end user experience on Tumblr will evolve on its own path.
Tumblr strikes me as one of the most interesting platforms for the future of open source publishing and social networking.
We in this community are, obviously, interested in this kind of stuff.
Does anyone want to speculate how things will unfold? I'm excited!
