James HThe Tumblr backend to WP idea comes from Automattic wanting to make Tumblr and its couple billion blogs federate. This is an idea they've been kicking around for probably a year and a half by now so a little more than just throwing things at the wall to see what sticks.
@acarson Oh, it’s definitely still throwing stuff at the wall to see what sticks. They pretty much gave up on developing Tumblr like a year ago and moved pretty much everyone on those teams to elsewhere in the company. Those who didn’t want to move were let go. But, that does solve their “we can’t make Tumblr stop losing money” problem.