microblogs

This page considers microblogging.

It covers -

• introduction
• uptake
• constant presence
• studies

     introduction

Micro-blogs or Tumblelogs ("to weblogs what text messages are to email") have been lauded as 'stream of consciousness' blogging and more authentic than what proponents damn as corporatised or routinised blogging. They have also been criticised as blogs for people with attention deficit disorder (ADD) or as just another fad that has attracted more media attention than practitioners.

Supposedly they -

represent the thoughts of the tumblelogger more or less as they happen, tumbling out of their brain, into a computer, then on to the web. ... Tumblelogs are the punk rock of blogging. They strip away all that prog-rock space jazz and focus on the content: short thoughts, quotes, photos, music, video clips and links. Unlike the verbose ramblings of most weblogs, where anything posted tends to be accompanied by several paragraphs of quotes, opinion and additional links, a tumblelogger just posts one thing at a time. ... Tumblelogging embraces the ephemeral existence of web content. A post is important today and all but forgotten tomorrow.

Microblog service Twitter thus offers entries such as -

walked straight into a hole

it's worse than I thought

can has teaburger?

munching on a banana and grouping objects by date

has popcorn

spying a second cup of tea

from a microblogger who proclaims "I live on the internet, and my guess is that you do too". Perhaps it is time to get some fresh air or heed complaints about "over-sharing".

Twitter’s founders have hailed it as a new form of human communication, "like a flock of birds choreographed in flight", as "another step toward the democratization of information" and all in all good thing. One offered the syrupy "I've come to really believe that if you make it easier for people to share information, more good things happen". His cofounder claimed that "Twitter is not about the triumph of technology. It’s about the triumph of the human spirit".

Microblog services proliferated in 2007, with substantial emulation of Twitter.com (eg Jaiku, Pownce, PlaceShout, Wamadu, Mogu2, Frazr, 1you, Baluuu, Me2Day, Dukudu, Numpa, Plappadu, Noumba and Mambler). Several expired during 2008, having failed to gain the commitment of a sufficiently large number of people (the 'microblogging community' as an avant-garde is necessarily fickle) and challenged by bringing in revenue for service maintenance and improvement.

The services typically allow posts (usually with a 100 to 140 character limit) from a mobile phone - 'blogging by SMS' - or a personal computer, with content being displayed online or even delivered by SMS to the numbers of people who subscribed to the particular microblog.

     uptake

It is difficult to escape the conclusion that microblogging is a fad - hyped by 'blog evangelists' in search of legitimacy, by venture capitalists (or merely microblog service developers seeking VC money) and by journalists eager to demonstrate that they are au fait with the latest online breakthrough or wow the undiscerning masses with breathless tales of what has replaced the radium pill, the flying car and the internet fridge.

Microblogs have a symbolic rather than practical function. Figures for the microblog population are uncertain: it is unclear who has tried microblogging and who has continued to microblog. There are few independent authoritative sources of information about the size of the microblog population or its demographics; claims that there has been major uptake in Australia and elsewhere are thus essentially untested.

Critics have sourly characterised tumblelogs as narcissistic twittering for fellow microbloggers and readers with the attention span of a gnat. A more generous assessment might be that microblogging is to blogging as the unicycle is to the bicycle: few devotees and questionable value.

Brevity does not preclude significance - the author of this page would, for example, prefer to read Lichtenberg's Aphorisms than endure another trek through the philosophising in War & Peace - but character limits and emulation within the 'microblog community' (no haiku, much "he is so hot" or "theyre closed dammit") means that much of the content in tumblelogs strikes some outsiders as distinctly trivial.

Defenders have lauded some microblogs as having an "intrinsic value" that transcends the genre, with an enthusiast praising the consumer reviews PlaceShout service ("Users have 100 characters to jazz or razz a place of business, and the reviews are overlaid on Google Maps", integrating revieing with 'local search' or IBNIS).

A PlaceShout proponent enthused that

Now you don't have to read through a 700 word thesis on how this guy went to that one breakfast restaurant and his eggs were runny and then the waitress spilled the coffee all over his lap and then they were slow to get the check and he wasted 90 minutes there when all he wanted was a quick breakfast. Instead, PlaceShout encourages this poor, put upon soul to express his grief in a few lines and then get out of your hair. You don't need to know his life story; the only information you need is that you should avoid this place at all costs unless you like bad food, bad service and coffee in your lap. See, way shorter and way more useful.

If you're not in the mood to review and are instead just looking for a cool new place to check out, PlaceShout makes that easy too. You can scan through the list of visible shout outs, browse by category, view the newest or hottest places, or hear about what the loudest users are saying.

Terseness might, of course, have all the justice of a drive-by shooting.

     studies

Studies of microblogs have centred on Twitter.

They include 'Why we twitter: understanding microblogging usage and communities' by Java, Song, Finin & Tseng in Proceedings of the 9th WebKDD and 1st SNA-KDD 2007 Workshop on Web Mining and Social Network Analysis (2007), 'Social Networks that Matter: Twitter Under the Microscope' by Huberman, Romero & Wu in 15(1) First Monday (2009), 'Beyond Microblogging: Conversation and Collaboration via Twitter' by Honeycutt & Herring in Proceedings of the 42nd Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (2009), and 'A few chirps about twitter' by Krishnamurthy, Gill & Arlitt in Proceedings of the First Workshop on online Social Networks (2008).




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