If you are posting your own or checking others’ status updates in Facebook, then you have been already introduced to the world of Microblogging. Services like Twitter have attained mass popularity by extending this concept & allowing everyone to post the answer to one question: What are you doing?
What is Microblogging?
Microblogging is a form of blogging that allows users to write brief text updates of about less than 140 characters and publish them. Microblogging is all about immediately sharing short thoughts, links to websites, or simply status updates of what you’re doing at the moment.
It is a cross between short blog posts, SMS text messages, instant messages and the status notifications on Facebook. It involves sending a instant text message through your desktop or a mobile to the public or a select group of people.
Depending on the service you’re using, your contacts can then check your message in their web browser, on their mobile phone, on their desktop, or even via an instant messaging application.
The limit of 140 characters ensures that the post is concise and not a in-depth lengthy announcements or analysis.
Why should you Microblog?
If you are a blogger or a business owner, and if you can gather a significant number of contacts on a service like Twitter you have an instant way to spread the word about your latest blog post, photos or product launch.
If you are attending a live event or a function, you can broadcast the live event using a mobile onto the internet.
Or you can do it just for fun. You can let your friends know that you are watching a movie and whether you are liking it or not!
Twitter is the most popular microblogging platform on the web, to the extent that Twitter has become more or less synonymous with microblogging
Microblogging with Twitter:
- Send messages of up to 140 characters at a time via SMS, instant messaging, email, Twitter’s website or third party applications. The sender can send it to the public or restrict delivery to a group.
- Follow friends from the Twitter community to track their latest updates. Users can receive updates via the Twitter website, SMS, RSS, email or through an application such as Facebook.
- Embed a badge in your blog or website, alerting visitors to your latest shared messages.However, Twitter is not without its problems. The site has faced numerous downtimes in the recent past which has made everyone question Twitter’s future existence.
Jaiku
In addtion to microblogging, Jaiku provides lifestreaming service through various inbound RSS streams to include content such as Flickr photos and blog posts. Jaiku allows other users to leave threaded comments on your Jaiku posts, which isn’t possible with Twitter.
Jaiku also offers close integration with Nokia S60 mobiles.
It is also important to note:
- Jaiku was acquired by Google in October 2007
- Most importantly, Jaiku is currently a closed beta service and people who wish to sign up have to wait for an account to become available.
Other Services
Pownce offers similar functionality to Twitter, but with the added ability to easily share files with your online contacts and send event invitations.
Recently, many new microblogging services have been making news. Significant ones include Tumblr, Spoink & Plurk.
Friendfeed is also being looked upon as a Twitter killer. Though Friendfeed is more of a Livestreaming service, its concept is being extended to that of a Microblogging replacement, so much that Techcrunch is already regarding Friendfeed as this year’s Twitter.
Conclusion:
Which Microblogging service should you use? More than the features or the interface provided, it ismore important that the service you choose must have the maximum number of users. As of date, Twitter is the largest microblogging service and this reason alone is enough for us to recommend you to use it. Just hope that the administrators of Twitter are able to maintain the service up & running.
Live Examples:
Large Businesses such as Cisco Systems use Twitter to provide product or service information.
The Los Angeles Fire Department put the technology to use during the October 2007 California wildfires
You can also follow Barack Obama on Twitter to track his US Presidential campaign.
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