Microblogging
by
Randy Mears
What do you get when you combine social networking, text messaging and blogging? The simple answer is microblogging, a term so new that it isn’t even in Wikipedia yet (at least it wasn’t there when I wrote this). The idea isn’t totally new but a recent implementation called twitter has already garnered more than a 100,000 members. Twitter defines itself as "A global community of friends and strangers answering one simple question: What are you doing?" You can answer this question at any time using text messaging on your phone or with instant messaging (IM) or even on the Web (including your Web phone). Access to the site was very slow today, perhaps due to new traffic generated by this Time Magazine article, but I was able to get most of its features to work easily with just a little patience.
There are other microblogging sites with slightly different capabilities but twitter appears to be the defining one. Because it makes use of text messaging, instant messaging and email (it also easily ties into a personal URL), twitter is a good mobile extension for the social networking problem.
Like many of the new ideas that get implemented on the Web, microblogging may not be everyone's cup-of-tea. Be that as it may, I'm sure we haven’t heard the last of it.
