Mr. Hackett (LinkedIn)

Just a couple of weeks ago, Tumblr president John Maloney took his leave of the company. Now we hear that head of brand strategy and marketing (and former Betabeat Poachable) Matt Hackett has departed, too. Formerly Tumblr's VP of engineering, Mr. Hackett moved to his current role in September of last year.

He's the second major departure (after Mr. Maloney) since the advent of a kind of advertising on the platform.

Mr. Hackett announced his departure via email, as first reported by Reuters social media editor Matthew Keys (AKA @producermatthew). He didn't elaborate on his reasons, but apparently before making his decision, he talked it over with a host of people up to and including David Karp. Appropriately enough, Mr. Hackett has since uploaded a memorial gif to his personal Tumblr, along with the note, "I will definitely miss you guys."

We've reached out to both Mr. Hackett and Tumblr for comment and will update once we've heard more.

Mr. Karp's Tumblr avatar (mashable.com)

Apparently Tumblr CEO David Karp has overcome his distaste for ads, because he just announced that advertisers will be able to buy access to the dashboard's "Tumblr Radar."

About 45 minutes ago, Rex Sorgatz tweeted the following dispatch from AdAge Digital: "Karp just announced that the Featured spot on the Tumblr dashboard is going up for sale to advertisers." Business Insider is reporting that the feature will go live as early as May 2.

Reached via email, Mr. Sorgatz provided more detail, telling Betabeat:

"It was the strangest 'closing keynote' speech I've ever seen. He was scheduled to talk for a half hour, but I think the whole thing lasted 7 minutes. He cited some growth numbers, mentioned how much he appreciates the creativity within the advertising community, and then broke the news that Tumblr would be opening up that spot to advertisers."

Mr. Sorgatz continued: "He gave no specifics, other than that it launches May 2. He flashed his email address on the screens, took no questions, and then zipped out the building."

Tumblr spokesperson Katherine Barna also told Business Insider that this new feature  is "not an 'ad unit' per se, but a package of native promotion for the Tumblr post ― the most essential and versatile piece of our network." We've reached out for clarification and will update as we soon as we learn more.

Regarding his earlier opposition to ads, Business Insider provides the following recantation from Mr. Karp: "I was probably being an idiot then." He also informed the audience that 122,302 users signed up for the service yesterday alone. Just last week, Mr. Karp told AdAge that Tumblr could toss up Google AdSense and be profitable almost immediately, but called it "a complete last resort."

At the time we took Mr. Karp's comments to mean no ads at all, but apparently after five years and $125 million in venture capital, Tumblr now finds itself last resort-adjacent, to use Mr. Karp's parlance. After some half-hearted attempts, it looks like the time to monetize is finally nigh and advertising will be the way.

We exaggerate--but there was a shiny, glittering feel to The Next Web's report on last Friday's "Let's Get Ready to Tumblr: Building community by reimagining and redistributing your content." The panel was part of Social Media Week and featured Tumblr notables from Buzzfeed, Flavorpill and The Atlantic.

The panel wasn't solely about sparkling Tumblr boosterism--there were straightforward insights as to why Tumblr simply works for so many who seem utterly addicted to the blogging platform. Buzzfeed's Lindsey Weber said Tumblr is all about ease of use and "observational humor." Ms. Weber and fellow panelists Russ Marshalek (Flavorpill) and Jared Keller (The Atlantic) listed some examples, including Gordon Ramsay and Das Racist Lyrics and Lisa Simpson Reading. There were also plenty of admissions regarding Tumblr's shortcomings:

If there was one theme that kept bubbling to the surface of our love of Tumblr teacup, it was that Tumblr isn't perfect. For all the raging traffic on the social platform, it lacks an analytical background. Platforms like Reddit and StumbleUpon have paid media buying programs because they can provide traffic figures, Tumblr doesn't. In essence, there's no way to find out who's looking at your Tumblr. For a marketing team, this is hell.

"From an operational and editorial standpoint, we adore Tumblr but from a business standpoint it's hard to go to someone in corporate and ask for more money for the platform when we can't even show them real analytics," says Jared.

While the panel addressed books based on viral Tumblrs (a perhaps complicated subject--GQ published some valid criticism of the phenomenon 2 years ago), Mr. Keller revealed that Tumblr has influenced sales of The Atlantic. Teens have written the magazine, said Mr. Keller, "to say that they've purchased the magazine because they loved the content on our Tumblr so much."

On Tuesday, Tumblr tweeted:

"A database issue is causing error messages on many pages. We’re working quickly to resolve the issue." on May 09, 2011 at 06:49PM

"We’re working quickly to resolve an issue causing a subset of blogs to be unavailable." on May 09, 2011 at 07:04PM

"Two hardware failures in the same database cluster have dramatically lowered performance for those blogs. Recovery is moving quickly." on May 09, 2011 at 08:31PM

Those tweets are now gone from Tumblr's Twitter.

CEO David Karp wrote a blog post about this downtime because it was pretty disruptive. But with smaller outages, Tumblr usually apologizes via Twitter, then deletes the tweet once the service is back up and calls it good.

We speculate that this is to prevent the company's Twitter feed, where Tumblr also posts meetups and featured users, from becoming a running log of shortcomings. We emailed Tumblr to ask why they delete their tweets, but did not receive a reply.

This revisionism does not seem to be common practice. Foursquare's status blog, also powered by Tumblr, does not appear to edit status updates after the fact. GroupMe is another company that has had frequent service advisories lately, most of them planned, which it advises users about via Twitter. GroupMe does not appear to delete service issue tweets.

Disclosure.

It's arguable that Wordpress and Tumblr are really competitors, since Wordpress is a sophisticated content management system for publishers with an extensive library of probably thousands of plug-ins and themes to extend its functionality, while Tumblr is a minimalist rich media blogging platform of which the news feed and social features are a major attraction. Wordpress is primarily front-facing; the backend is a mess of wires and code. Tumblr is bi-directional--a Tumblr that lives on a .com makes for a pretty website that you may not be able to tell is part of a socially-driven application, but much of the activity happens inside the network's walls.

Photo: MSPaint

"Finally!" local Tumblr mogul Anthony de Rosa reblogged when he saw the news. It's rather amazing that an embeddable "share this via Tumblr" button didn't exist already--we know users have been clamoring for it, and it's something the other major major social network start-up in this city added before it had half Tumblr's userbase--but now it's here, so shut up. "It’s now super easy to add a 'Share on Tumblr' button to any site," the company staff blog says. "The Tumblr Button can give you complete control over how your content appears when shared on Tumblr. Not only does this mean specifying an excerpt or summary, but also deciding whether it appears as a Link, Quote, Photo, or Video Embed.

"Even better: This can be deeply integrated with just about any publishing platform to add contextual buttons next to things like paragraphs or photos... The appearance of the button is also completely customizable."

When asked for comment, local Tumblr moguls said, "Weee."

Tumblr servers crashed around the time Betabeat discovered the new button and remain crashed as we type. "We're very sorry," the 404 page commented.

Tumblr President and customer service special agent John Maloney. (Source: john.io)

Tumblr has restored Microsoft researcher and pundit Danah Boyd's blog to its original location after a public spat.

Yesterday, Microsoft researcher of 43,900+ Twitter follower fame Danah Boyd discovered her Tumblr account, zephoria.tumblr.com, had been changed to zephoria1.tumblr.com to make room for Zephoria Inc., a New York-based social media marketing agency. Ms. Boyd is an infrequent Tumblr user--her last entry was in January--but she was irritated that one, Tumblr would automatically give preference to a corporation, and two, she had no idea her blog was being moved until it happened.

Ms. Boyd wrote a miffed open letter to Tumblr saying she was "shocked, outraged, and disappointed" and "pissed." Tumblr's CEO David Karp and President John Maloney scrambled to defuse the situation, at first via Twitter and through the company's Richmond-based customer service office, making contradictory statements about how and when Ms. Boyd had been notified.

Mr. Maloney and Ms. Boyd spoke by phone late last night. In a conversation that Ms. Boyd described on her blog as "lovely" and that ended after 10:30 p.m., Mr. Maloney apologized for a "human error" in customer service and said Tumblr was restoring Ms. Boyd's account to its original location. Tumblr had shifted Ms. Boyd to zephoria1.tumblr.com, keeping her followers and content, but breaking any links to her posts elsewhere on the web.

Mr. Maloney told Ms. Boyd that Tumblr has only had four issues where users were upset after being booted due to potential trademark infringement, and argued that the Gawker-publicized case of a user who was kicked off pitchfork.tumblr.com ten minutes after Pitchfork Media requested the domain was a case of squatting.

"I’m really grateful for Tumblr’s willingness to take this seriously and restore my account as well as my respect for them as a company," Ms. Boyd wrote, but said she will blog about her full thoughts on the situation and the larger issue of corporations kicking users off their names later today.

Zephoria the company has been moved to zephoriainc.tumblr.com.

"Tumblr did not notify me. And while their ToS says that they will, it also says that Tumblr 'reserves the right to remove any Subscriber Content from the Site, suspend or terminate Subscriber’s right to use the Services at any time,'" she wrote. It appears Ms. Boyd's most recent post was in January.

"Hi Danah. We never reassign domains w/o notifying users first. Our support team reached out two weeks ago and didn't hear back," CEO David Karp said on Twitter. "Please let me know if there's absolutely anything I can do to help. I'm sorry for the trouble."

"What I want is my acct name back. I'd be happy to help you improve your notifying processes," Ms. Boyd wrote back.

This isn't the first time Tumblr has sparked ire for shuffling around blog names. A user posting at pitchfork.tumblr.com was booted by Pitchfork Media in February, 2010. Tumblr told the user it had notified him 72 hours before the switch, but Pitchfork publicly said the account was handed over within "10 minutes," contradicting Tumblr's official account.

Tumblr's official account is already a bit mixed up. According to Ms. Boyd, Tumblr's customer service reps told her they'd emailed her 72 hours in advance of the switch "but screenshot they sent me said they emailed me on Passover," she said, which was over a week ago, while Mr. Karp said the notification was sent two weeks ago.

Betabeat contacted Tumblr, which said it would have a statement for us soon (UPDATE: Tumblr statement below. Also President John Maloney tweeted: "We're in touch w/ Danah and I'm sure she'll be updating... We have arguably the best community support team on the web.") We'll see if Mr. Karp can turn this one around, as Ms. Boyd is one unhappy (unpaid) customer.

"I’m also pissed at Tumblr," she wrote. "Why is it acceptable for them to just delete my content without notifying me? For them to break the web by killing off links to my posts? For them to not leave room to negotiate?"

Zephoria, described as "business marketing consulting services using the Internet," registered a trademark in New York in 2002. Twitter and other web services will take down usernames that conflict with an official trademark.

"The whole point of trademark is to not allow people to confuse customers. I’m not doing anything to confuse customers," Ms. Boyd wrote. "I also can’t help but wonder how many other people get screwed because individuals are never given the same social status as corporations in this digital environment. Le sigh."

UPDATE: "Tumblr does not reassign domains without notification. We reached out to Danah via her registered email and gave her a chance to object but received no reply. And yes, we've already reached out to her regarding this." Betabeat also reached out to Ms. Boyd via email and Twitter (we'll take her number, if you've got it!) but did not immediately get a response.

UPDATE 2: Ms. Boyd sent us an email: "Short version is that things are still in progress and I'm waiting to hear back from them." She said liked Betabeat's story on Tumblr earlier this week. "Very much 'with great attention comes great responsibility.' <GRIN>"

It looks like all her content transferred to the new URL, zephoria1.tumblr.com, Ms. Boyd said. "And it looks like the followers transferred (which is actually how I used the site the most). It also looks like [Zephoria] is calling up other social media services to try to take over my account. I'm still investigating all of this but not at all surprised. Apparently, they're a SEO company. And apparently my social media usage affects their SEO. Le sigh."

UPDATE 3: "My email shows no record of having received that email but that’s not entirely surprising given how often form mail often ends up in spamland," Ms. Boyd said. "They told me that they normally give bloggers 72 hours to respond and then they turn over accounts. So they contacted me on April 19 and moved my account on April 22. I learned about this today.

"I responded to them about the problems with their approach and offered to help. I also asked for my account to be reinstated; I argued that reputation online is not just about trademark and that it shouldn’t be acceptable to use trademark as a justification to make people’s material online disappear. I’m waiting to hear back.

"I also learned in the process that the company is a search engine optimization company which explains why they’re going after my representation on social media sites, given the priority that Google places on such sites.

"I also read Twitter’s policy on Trademark which is starkly different in its approach, highlighting that trademark is only relevant when the person online is trying to confuse the public: http://support.twitter.com/articles/18367."

NOTE TO TUMBLR: Betabeat has a trademark too, and we wouldn't mind if you kicked this derp off, who hasn't updated in a year.

UPDATE: Tumblr restored Ms. Boyd's account.