Micro-blogging

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Micro-blogging is a form of multimedia blogging that allows users to send brief text updates or micromedia such as photos or audio clips 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, digital audio or the web.

The content of a micro-blog differs from a traditional blog in that it is typically more topical, smaller in aggregate file size (e.g. text, audio or video) but is the same in that people utilize it for both business and individual reasons. Many micro-blogs provide this short commentary on a person-to-person level, or share news about a company's products and services.

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[edit] Services

In May 2007, 111 Twitter-like sites were counted internationally.[1] However, the most notable 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.[2] The main competitors to Twitter have been Plurk and Jaiku.

More recently, varieties of services and software with the feature of micro-blogging have been developed. Plurk has a timeline view which integrates video and picture sharing. Pownce (developed by Digg founder Kevin Rose with three other developers) integrated micro-blogging with file sharing and event invitations. Following the acquisition of Pownce by SixApart it has been shut down effective December 15, 2008 while an upcoming replacement "Motion" is in the works.

Rakawa.net documents and informs about daily accomplishments of the users based on the question "What have you achieved today?" Traction TeamPage is this first integration of micro-blogging as an interface over any designated workspace in an Enterprise 2.0 suite[3].

Other leading social networking websites Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, and Xing also have their own micro-blogging feature, better known as status updates.

With the growth of micro-blogging, many users want to maintain presence in more than one of these social networks. Services such as Socialthing and Profilactic will aggregate micro-blogs from multiple social networks into a single list. Services such as Ping.fm will send out your micro-blog to multiple social networks.

[edit] Related concepts

Instant messaging systems display status, but generally only one of a few choices, such as: available, off-line, away. Away messages (messages displayed when the user is away) form a kind of micro-blogging.

In the Finger protocol, the .project and .plan files are sometimes used for status updates similar to micro-blogging.

[edit] See also

[edit] References

  1. ^ Article on thws.cn. A Chinese site, but the article is in English. Retrieved August 4, 2008.
  2. ^ "We Won!" March 14, 2007 Twitter Official Blog, retrieved April 25, 2008
  3. ^ Live Blog 21 November 2008 Announcement by Traction Software

[edit] External links

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