Due to a set of personal circumstance, I’ve been a little quite on social channels over the last few weeks. Tho I’ve check in here and there I haven’t been in very deep consuming or publishing mode. 

As I loaded up the ‘ole Tumblr Dashboard to write a post for today I noticed something funny with my follower count. After a double take, I flipped over to Twitter to see my follower count there. Sure enough, over the last few weeks the number of followers on Tumblr has surpassed the number of followers I have on Twitter. By a fairly significant margin.

Now, I’m not a big follower counter but this is kind of interesting to me.

I’ve been on Twitter for upwards of 5 years, I’ve been active on this tumblr page for about 18 months. Best I can tell, I add 10-20 new followers on Twitter a day and around 50-75 on Tumblr every day.

Not sure what this says about Twitter v. Tumblr growth rates (probably nothing), but it does have me rethinking what time I invest where. 

I’m finding that between the “Network” tab on Bitly, News.me and Percolate emails, and Techmeme I’m catching all of the news/posts I want to catch off of Twitter. After light usage over the last few weeks, I’m also keenly aware that Twitter is really not a social network for me anymore- it’s an RSS reader. And it’s become a bit unwieldy for me.

My real friend based social stuff is mainly on Foursquare and Instagram these days. And my usage and love for those services continues to grow each and every day.

Tumblr is still this mysterious animal to me. It’s not really a news reader. It’s not really a social network. It has a publishing and social dynamic all it’s own that feels different and rewards a different approach to posting and self expression.

It’s also now where I have my largest audience, so I’m rethinking how I’ve been using it and engaging with those following along here.

Perhaps that’s just a long winded way of saying it’s good to be back.

But, hey, it’s good to be back.