Tumblr’s CEO David Karp spoke to Crunchfund’s MG Siegler today at Techcrunch Disrupt about the current status of the company he founded in 2007 and dropped some interesting knowledge.

One of the interesting things to note is that the pair announced that Crunchfund is now an investor in Tumblr, which is a huge feather in Crunchfund’s young cap.

Siegler also asked Karp about Tumblr’s similarities to Pinterest, which recently joined the billion dollar valuation club, and Karp had an interesting response:

We try so hard not to see anyone in this ecosystem as a competitor.

Does that mean that Karp feels like Tumblr is a billion dollar company? He didn’t say as much, but it’s clear that the company is laser-focused to stay its own unique business, one complete with a business model.

On how important social media has become, Karp shared that the bulk of traffic that Tumblr sees comes from Twitter and Facebook. Not Google. This isn’t surprising, but speaks volumes about the real-time value of Tumblr. While most blogs rely on Google for the bulk of its traffic, Tumblr has carved itself a niche that is a hybrid between real-time and static content. Basically, the company has built the best of both worlds.

In a post appropriately shared on Tumblr, John Maloney has announced that he’s stepping down as President of the content-sharing site. Maloney has filled this role at Tumblr for the past four years, and says that the team is in very capable hands with CEO and founder David Karp. Here’s a excerpt from Maloney’s post:

I’ll start by saying it has been an absolute joy and privilege to be the President of Tumblr these past four years

To work alongside these special people, with our intense focus on product, positivity, fun and whimsy — from our small team came what is now a community of over 50 million

It’s been a seminal experience, and I’m proud of the work

I told the team and board this week that it’s time for me to transition away from running day-to-day operations. It’s the right time for me and a good time for Tumblr. We’re in great hands with David and the excellent leadership team we’ve built. The company is filled with amazing people

That said, I’m not going very far. The transition from running ops is effective immediately, but I’m sticking close w/ David, the team and company. There’s more work to do and I want to help see it thru

It sounds as if Maloney will maintain an advisory role with the company, or at least making himself available to the team he helped build over the years. In addition to this, it seems like Maloney is ready to mentor some more startups and founders, as a way of “paying it forward”.

Tumblr announced two weeks ago that it would start implementing advertising on the site, helping it build a steady stream of revenue.

The company seems to be on quite a winning streak lately, announcing that it had hit 20 billion posts, with over 50 million hosted blogs. To grow the readership of those 50 million blogs, Tumblr’s new Facebook Timeline integration will definitely do the trick.

Tumblr is on the cusp of doing something quite incredible. Google searches mentioning the service are poised to surpass searches for ‘blog’ by the end of the year, showing that the New York-based company has truly established itself as the Web’s most popular blogging platform.

Comparing the two terms, ‘blog’ is currently ahead — as you can see here –  but XKCD blogger Randall Munroe [via TPM] believes that ‘Tumblr’ will see more Google searches by October 12 this year.

This incredible situation shows that Tumblr’s fast growth is not limited to the content on its platform — which the latest stats put it at 20 billion posts from more than 50 million hosted blogs, and 15 billion pageviews – and its reputation continues to surge with Internet users.

Google search numbers are not an exact statistic, but the content of searches does indicate the popularity and interest in services, people and topics online. While it’s true to say that a great many blog readers go straight to sites via Twitter, RSS feeds, emails and other links, Tumblr’s continued rise is massively significant.

If you are a business or individual with a blog that you want to be found online, then running it, or another, on Tumblr is likely to bring you more traffic.

The business world has been largely unsure of how to cater for Tumblr — which is shareable and fast-paced as Twitter but populated with more inspiring text and rich images — and this is likely to be a wake-up call for them.

As for Tumblr itself, the Web darling is working on strategies to monetise its growing platform, which includes highlighting posts for $1; an introduction that founder David Karp calls ”one of [Tumblr's] most successful revenue-generating features.”

We’re big fans of Tumblr at TNW. You can read our Tumblr Tuesday interviews — which spotlight notable users of the platform — and check out our very own TNW Tumblr blog.

Sharing Tumblr posts on Facebook has been the same as adding any other piece of content until now. Tumblr has just announced that it finally has been accepted as an Open Graph partner and will be publishing feeds to your Timeline, News Feed, and Ticker respectively:

Sharing your posts on Facebook just got a billion times better, with integration into Facebook’s Timeline, News Feed, and Ticker.

New options include:

- Toggle “Send to Facebook” when posting.
- Share Replies on your Facebook Timeline.
- Share Likes on your Facebook Timeline.
(They even get lumped together so they’re not overwhelming!)

You can find the new options in your blog settings. If your blog is already connected to Facebook, you’ll be automatically prompted to upgrade.

Now that Tumblr posts are treated different on your Timeline, your posts wont get lost amongst all of the other junk content that you post. As more apps start using the new Open Graph features from Facebook, people’s profiles are easier to read. I’m really enjoying how my Foursquare check-ins are lumped together, much like you see for Tumblr posts below:

Services are starting to say that they’re seeing more traffic and engagement thanks to Facebook’s new Timeline, which is now mandatory for all pages and profiles on the social network. These new features will guarantee more traffic to Tumblr’s over 20 million pages of content.

What are some of your favorite services that haven’t started using Open Graph yet? Let us know in the comments

The dashboard that serves as the starting point for millions of posts ranging from text to video, has gotten a bit of refresh with new icons.

As a reminder, here’s what you saw when you logged into Tumblr before today:

This memorable set of icons have been in place since Tumblr first launched, with new options following the same design when they were added. A designer at Tumblr, Zack Sultan, posted a confirmation on his blog that these new icons were in place for everyone:

You’ll notice that the icons have gotten a more literal treatment, especially for the audio, video, and photo buttons. The colors are more vibrant as well, and the “page” background on each icon has been removed so that the graphics can stand up by themselves.

This is a nice change of pace for Tumblr and better represents its fun and powerful self-expressive nature.

For those of you that use Tumblr every day, did you notice the new icons and do you like them? Tell us in the comments.

Imagine logging into any service on the web and being told that it’s probably a good idea to stop using a browser extension that you’ve installed. That’s what happened to one of our faithful readers, Derek.

The Missing e Chrome extension, which has a name that pokes fun at Tumblr’s lack of a second vowel, adds a ton of functionality to your experience on the social blogging platform. It’s quite popular too, with the Chrome Web Store reporting 258,408 users.

When Derek logged into Tumblr today, he was greeted with this overwhelming pop-up:

In the prompt, the company says that it loves developers who create add-on experiences for its site, but it creates issues that are a “burden” on its support staff. In particular, Tumblr says that Missing e may cause data loss, privacy, and performance issues that it can’t support. It sounds like one of those TV commercials for medications where they rattle off all of the side-effects they may cause.

Third-party extensions and hacks are a part of the web, perhaps Tumblr should focus on building new features or its own official “app store” instead of whining about support and server issues.

Following politicians on Twitter can be as boring as watching paint dry on some days, but a new app pulls together tweets from both parties, and shows a whole host of trends about what they’re tweeting about.

PolitickerUSA is a simple app that displays tweets from every politician that uses the Twitter platform. At the very least, the service is the best social list of every U.S. Senator and Representative on the web.

You can watch tweets fly by in real-time, or you can filter them by your favorite politico.

One Nation, Under Tweets

PolitickerUSA is extremely well designed, and splits politicians on the homepage by their political party affiliation. The tweets flow in, and you can click them to drive you straight to Twitter.

Where PolitickerUSA gets really interesting is with the trends that it puts together into a cloud, based on mentions of words and phrases in the politicians’ tweets.

You can check trends by party, or by individual politician. These features make the site extremely useful, especially around voting time. If you’re not sure where a politician stands on important matters, getting a 50-100 tweet snapshot of what they’re talking about will give you a good idea.

You’re given a drop down of all of the politicians listed on the PolitickerUSA site, so you can literally spend hours going through all of the data. The clouds definitely help with displaying the important sentiments, thus skipping the boring process of actually reading the tweets.

One the homepage, you can do a filter search if you have a specific interest, and you’ll be shown the matching tweet from each side of the political fence. If you’re super into politics, or you’re trying to pay more attention, PolitickerUSA will be your best resource for up-to-the-minute political information.

With Tumblr helping us make phone calls to our Representatives about the “Stop Online Piracy Act”, this app can help us tweet to them about it too.

➤ PolitickerUSA

To combat the ill-conceived “Stop Online Piracy Act”, or commonly referred to as “SOPA” on the Internet, Tumblr asked its users to make phone calls to their U.S. Representatives to make their feelings known.

Tumblr users complied, to the tune of 87,834 phone calls in one day.

In a blog post from the Tumblr staff today, the company had this to say about the initiative:

Yesterday we did a historic thing. We generated 87,834 phone calls to U.S. Representatives in a concerted effort to protect the Internet. Extraordinary. There’s no doubt that we’ve been heard.

So just to keep you updated: The well-intentioned, but immensely flawed “Stop Online Piracy Act” is still in the House Judiciary Committee. The hearing was yesterday and now members will debate and bring amendments to the bill. The Committee will reconvene in a few weeks — the date has yet to be scheduled. Nothing has been brought to a final vote. Everything is still very much in play. We’ll keep you posted on what’s going on and what you can do to help. But for now, we want to thank you.

The act, which would give private companies and the government more power to overseeing what you download from the Internet, is currently being discussed in the House of Representatives.

Tumblr put together an amazing app that let you put in your phone number and area code, which would then generate a phone call to you. Once your phone rings, you’re given some talking points about SOPA, and are then connected to your local Representative. The company used Twilio to power the dialing app.

Will you fight the Stop Online Piracy Act with companies like Tumblr? Share your thoughts in the comments.

Like them or not, Klout has been around for three years and is continuing its quest to become the standard of influence online. Competitors have been announced, but have not yet launched.

Today I sat down with Klout CEO Joe Fernandez to discuss the future of Klout, and what the company has learned along the way.

Fernandez would love to see Klout scores rolling along the screen with Tweets on networks like CNN one day. But why? What is it that makes us want some sort of validation before we see someone or something as being credible?

Fernandez simply told me:

TV, Radio, and News are measured.

Since sites like Twitter, Facebook, WordPress, Tumblr, and YouTube let us become “broadcasters”, Fernandez feels that people should be measured as well. The data we put into these sites needs to be cleaned up and normalized, and Fernandez thinks Klout is the one that can do it best.

Do we really need a score to validate ourselves?

The problem that I’ve had with Klout is how the loudest users have talked it up and beat it down. Early adopters are a blessing and a curse for any service, but especially one that brings out everyone’s inner ego.

Fernandez shares that the company receives emails and calls all of the time arguing that a person should be more influential in one thing rather than another, or that their score is completely off.

That’s the mystery though, nobody knows exactly what goes into the Klout score.

Google doesn’t tell you how its algorithm works.

This is what Joe Fernandez told me when I discussed Google’s approach to search engine relevance with him and how it relates to Klout’s business. This statement is true, and while SEO experts continually try to game Google’s algorithm, Google continues to update things which completely changes the game in real-time. Klout takes the same approach, and has been evolving its own scoring algorithm for the past three years.

He shared:

What we learn from people like Google, is that every decision comes with an unintended consequence. You have to keep making changes.

How does Klout change Customer Service?

Fernandez and I discussed Customer Service, and I brought up my own concerns about brands using Klout scores to lazily keep those with large followings happy by treating them differently. Companies not paying attention to those with lower Klout scores is not companies intention at all, though.

Fernandez points out that this segmentation already happens in most large-scale businesses, and Klout merely wants to help people learn that everyone has influence and how they can harness their own. The Perks service is a way that Klout lets users gain something from their never-ending updates on the internet. Fernandez says that 80% of the companies who have done a Klout Perk comes back to them with a new Perk.

Comfort through transparency and education

Fernandez discussed Klout’s heavy engineering focus:

Our DNA is science and engineering.

This “DNA” has caused some to attack Klout, wondering why one company should have so much data, and if it’s really worth it for people get so competitive about it. Actually, people are getting past just checking out their Klout Score. We’re told that over Fifty percent of users dig deeper into Klout, showing a little more engagement than the company’s early days.

Now that the company has grown to over forty employees, it is now focusing on marketing and education. Tomorrow the company will launch “Klout Score Insights”, which promises to give users a bit of an explanation when their score goes up or down. This type of feature can go a long way for transparency, as Fernandez explains:

Being “the standard” means people need to feel comfortable and have enough insight. Score Insight has been in development for five months.

Klout not just for Twitter users

Klout isn’t just about Twitter anymore, as the CEO shared with us that most of Klout’s growth in the past six months is coming from Facebook users, and that user base is quickly overtaking the Twitter early adopter set.

There are still a few things I’d like to see from Klout. I believe that more education and services are needed for the businesses themselves, especially since people are starting to add their Klout score to resumes and personal websites. Businesses should also have Klout scores, which would serve as a Better Business Beauru service for the connected crowd.

When asked why Fernandez chose the word “influence” to describe Klout, even though its an extremely subjective concept, he said:

Influence is such a lightning rod and could mean anything, and when I said it, people paid attention.

Will insights and continual tweaks to its algorithm be enough to show us that Klout is a data driven company and not a popularity leader board? Joe Fernandez thinks so, and we’ll see first hand tomorrow when the algorithm changes, and when we’re given some insights into why our scores have soared or dropped.

One of the funnest things to do on the internet is share an animated .gif file. It’s faster than making someone watch a video clip, and it’s a great way to express yourself. For the most part, the same stale animated gifs make the rounds, ranging from cats falling off of chairs to clips from famous movies.

GifBoom wants you to be able to make your own animated gifs and share them easily. The app for iOS was developed by the company Tapmojo, and is a Tumblr users new best friend. The app is free to download.

Creating an animated gif

Creation is simple with GifBoom. You can choose to use pictures or videos already on your camera roll to piece together a seamless animated graphic. Alternatively you can take new pictures to make your animation, and the app will automatically take photos every second for 20 seconds.

Once your 20 seconds are up, you can choose which frames to included in your animation and then your animated gif is complete. You can even choose filter effects and backgrounds, as well as the frame rate to control how fast the animated gifs display. It will end up looking something like this:

Sharing your animated gif

This is where GifBoom shines. You can share your creation via Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, via MMS, or just email the link. Unfortunately, we’ll have to manually share a link or upload direct to Google+, since the service doesn’t have write-enabled APIs as of yet. GifBoom is also very social in a way that Instagram is. There is a stream of popular gifs, as well as recently created ones. You can “like” a gif or leave a comment, much like you can on Instagram.

Animated gifs are certainly a niche interest, but are very popular on sites like Tumblr. With the GifBoom app, it’s really simple to create the animations but it remains to be seen if animated gifs can get anywhere near as popular as photo or video sharing.

Other apps that have similar features are Picflick, but it lacks the social aspect of GifBoom and costs .99 cents.