According to the people at Twimbler, the answer is yes, but we’re not so sure we see the point. Twimbler is a new Twitter mashup that uses a special hashtag to parse Twitter posts into a tumblelog format. The result is a tumblelog that you post to via Twitter, and to be frank, it’s kind of silly.
The benefit of Twimbler, we suppose, is that it is one less service you need to log into to maintain your online presence. If you want to have a tumblelog and already use Twitter, with Twimbler you can continue to use Twitter as usual and gain a tumblelog without any extra work.
But the problem is that Twimbler doesn’t do enough to differentiate itself from a normal Twitter stream, nor enough to really be a very robust tumblelogging platform. Twimbler is built around links. You tweet links at it via a hashtag, and it parses those links into posts. It recognizes YouTube vidoes and embeds those, but doesn’t recognize images (as far as we could tell), nor does it recognize videos from other services. That means that it’s basically a Twitter stream with YouTube videos embedded.
Because it is based on links, Twimbler also misses some of the features that most tumblelogging platforms support, such as quotes, events, or regular posts.
The final nail in Twimbler’s coffin, however, is that many tumblelogging platforms, including Tumblr, support the automatic posting of your Twitter stream (among other outside activity streams). So if you really wanted to run a tumblelog off your Twitter stream, Tumblr could do it for you and offer a complete tumblelogging platform to boot. It won’t parse YouTube video links from tweets into embeds, but I don’t think that’s enough of a differentiator to make Twimbler worth it.
What Twimbler does do well, however, is illustrate how services can use hashtags to build utility on top of Twitter. While checking out Twimbler I couldn’t help but think that a neat bookmarking tool could be build on top of Twitter that way — maybe a service that used a #delicious hash tag to send bookmarks to your del.icio.us account, for example.
