Microblogging is Blogging
Microblogging is simply blogging in micro size. It means blogging with brief texts with options to add photos or audi-clips. Due to its brevity, microblogging is very popular with mobile phone users and busy people who don’t have the time to write a bull-blown article for blog posting. Microblogging updates/postings can be anything as long as they are short and within the maximum words allowed. The contents can be on personal level as update of what someone is doing or on the business level with the latest update of products and services. Even news services also use microblogging to disseminate the information to the public (or followers as they are usually referred to).
In terms of content, there is really nothing different between “normal” blogging and microblogging. You can just write about anything and about what you want to write. Of course, in business, people will plan the content properly as to project corporate image. Since the content is brief, it is much easier for people to just write something on-the-fly. That is why people can update the microblogs very frequently in a day. The most common contents are update of what people are doing and thinking. Very frequently also people comment on each other’s postings.
Here is a list of my posts on Twitter.
Currently, the most popular microblogging is Twitter. Launched in July 2006, Twitter has become the most popular microblogging site and its name is almost synonymous to microblogging. Twitter ranked 287 in Alexa as of March 2009. Here are the other popular English microblogging sites (with Alexa ranking): Tumblr (2,551), Plurk (6,629), Jaiku (59,281), Kronologger (347,889) in Indonesia, Hictu (719,358), Pacmee (899,739) in Malaysia, MoodMill (964,712), I Rate My Day (1,066,114) and MySay (1,846,084).
Some social networking sites also provide their own microblogging feature better known as updates. As examples, they are Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, Xing and Bebo. There are many coming along as well.
With so many microblogging applications available, many people might want to maintain presence in more than one of these social networks. Services such as SocialThing and Profilatic come in handy in aggregating the updates from various microblogging sites. Another useful service is Ping.fm. Using the Ping.fm, you can send out your update to multiple social networks as it will be difficult if you want to send updates to all social networks that you belong to.
With this short introduction, I hope it has given a brief overview of what microblogging is all about.
