MANILA, Philippines -- Retention rate. It's an internet statistic that describes a website's "stickiness," how good it is at keeping people. Its most interesting application is in the world of social media, where it describes the percentage of people who keep patronizing a service after they've signed onto it.

After all, just because you make a Blogger, Twitter, or Facebook account doesn't mean you'll end up using it, much less stay signed onto it.

Ultimately, retention rates give insight into the most important thing about websites: their appeal, their "user-friendliness," and the long-term satisfaction we derive from them.

ztwitter's retention rate is between 40-50 percent. Facebook's is at 70 percent. That tells us that people are more likely to keep using Facebook than Twitter in the long run. It supports what we all know in reality: that people are more likely to have Facebook than Twitter, and that many of us who do have Twitter accounts don't often use them, if at all.

But if there's a site that really has people hooked, it's Tumblr.

Tumblr, compared to both Facebook and Twitter, has a "small" following of just 17.5 million total blogs as of the beginning of this month. Retention rates tell the bigger story, though. Tumblr has an 85 percent retention rate, meaning people are more likely to keep using it than Twitter and even Facebook.

Couple that with Tumblr's growth rate, which has it growing by an average 250 million page views a week, and by the end of the year it may well overtake Wordpress, which currently has 20 million users (sadly, they have no information on retention rates.) What does that mean? It means that tumblelogging looks poised to overtake traditional blogging as the new "in-thing" on the internet. What makes it so different? Tumblr is a little bit of everything. It's a little bit of Wordpress, a little bit of Facebook, and a little bit of Twitter. But unlike Wordpress, it's not about long, rambling blocks of text which most of us would rather not read.

Unlike Facebook, it's not about how large the friends list is. And unlike Twitter, posts aren't limited to 140 characters—or to words, for that matter.

Tumblr is about what's on your mind, but it takes into account that we think, dream of, and imagine comes in a variety of forms. That's why you can post anything: a short note, a video, a soundbite, or a picture. That way, you aren't confined to being boring by default, which is the danger with blogs with big blocks of text. Tumblr allows you to be as interesting and expressive as you can be (and probably really are.)

Unlike blogging, where you spend time thinking carefully  about what you say in each post, Tumblr is really more about the moment of consciousness, and capturing a snapshot of it. Hence, where blog posts are supposed to be solid and stand-alone, Tumblr posts stand in relation to an entire thread of posts. That's why looking at a Tumblr page is like taking a peek into a person's stream of consciousness. But the winning thing about Tumblr is its reblog feature.

To be popular in Tumblr is to be reblogged consistently. Reblogging allows you to take embed someone else's post in yours — in a dialog balloon-type frame that's highly suggestive of what Tumblr is about — or add commentary to it. It's a little like commenting, but made even better: It's blogging as a conversation. Tumblr is all about individual streams of consciousness coming together to keep a conversation going.

Tumblr is the perfect expression of what being on the internet is all about these days. It's about expressing who you are or how you want to be known, and letting people respond to that in a conversation where they express their ideal selves to you as well. Where traditional blogs are prone to self-indulgence, Tumblr admits to it and, having gotten the awkwardness out of the way, lets people indulge collectively in themselves and in others. I think it's not too far-fetched to say that it's possible to meet the most interesting people on Tumblr, and that genuine dialogue can happen in it. So it's not hard to see why Tumblr retains so many people. It's addictive, even "blogging as it was meant to be," as one blogger put it. Maybe one of these days I'll create one myself.

The author is a third year BS Management major at the Ateneo de Manila University.