Micro-blogging is a form of blogging that allows users to write brief text updates (usually 140 characters) and publish them, either to be viewed by anyone or by a restricted group which can be chosen by the user. These messages can be submitted by a variety of means, including text messaging, instant messaging, email, MP3 or the web.
The most popular service is Twitter, which was launched in July 2006 and won the Web Award in the blog category at the 2007 South by Southwest Conference in Austin, Texas.[1] The main competitor to Twitter has been Jaiku (although this has since been acquired by Google and closed public registrations).
Recently, however, many new services, with the same feature of micro-blogging are being born. Digg founder Kevin Rose, together with three other developers recently launched a service called Pownce, which integrates micro-blogging with file-sharing and event invitations.
Microblogging services which seek to add to the minimalism of raw microblogging include Spoink and Plurk. Spoink released a multimedia micro-blogging service that integrates blogging, podcasting, telephony and SMS texting and supports all major mobile audio, video and picture formats. Plurk utilizes a rich interface and horizontal time-line to add a spatial dimension to microblogging.
The popular social networking websites Facebook, MySpace and LinkedIn also have a micro-blogging feature, called "status update".
In May, 2007, an article counted a total of 111 Twitter-like sites internationally.[2] Potentially this is set to explode as open source contender identi.ca launched in July 2008, built on an open microblogging tool, Laconica. By releasing this tool it seeks to create a distributed microblogging system which will negate the negative effects notoriously experienced by Twitter of service downtime based on busy usage. Microblogging has often been criticized for the banality of some of the messages but it is slowly making its way into mainstream organizations. Private and Public organizations are using microblogging to quickly broadcast vital information. Companies are already using microblogging to create more opportunities to engage audience and employees.[3]
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