TWITTERIFIC

This.

Is.

A.

Blog.

And life's little interesting moments...

...tend to come between blog posts.

And that, o best beloved, is the ethos behind microblogging. Microblogging is like blogging in that you tell the world what you are doing, but micro. That means that when you don't have time to make a whole new blog post, you go to your microblogging site (Twitter, Jaiku et al) and update your status. Your friends "follow" you and get informed whenever you update you status. Sounds familiar? That's because it is the younger brother of Facebook. At around the same time as the birth of Facebook, other techies were thinking about getting in touch in a whole new way. The idea was that you told your friends what you were doing without round robin emails or time-consuming blog posts. Little bite-sized bloglets were first thought of like this by a Fin named Jyri Engestrom in early 2006. He created Jaiku, so named because the microblogs his users created looked like Japanese hAIKUS. JAIKU. Twitter was started around the same time in Californian by Jack Dorsey, Biz Stone and Evan Williams, and is probably more successful than Jaiku. Twitter is used by a multitude of this world's great and good. Stephen Fry, Jonathan Ross and Robert Llewellyn all have Twitter, and people like to think that by following these people on Twitter they are that little bit closer to their heroes (it's also shameless self-promotion). Here is a collation of Jyri's philosophy on microblogging and social networking.
(I tried looking at this on preview and it didn't go straight to the slideshow. Try clicking on the hyperlink.)

Microblogging: Tiny social objects. On the future of participatory media

View more presentations or upload your own. (tags: jaiku mobile)

Jaiku had arrived. Then later that year, in October 2006, Twitter was commercially launched. Twitter, like Jaiku, can be done from mobile devices, which means that you can update your status without even having access to a PC or laptop. Twitter lets its users update what they're doing in 140 characters or less (the post is called a tweet). That is proper microblogging, and to honour it, I shall write the next few paragraphs in chunks of 140 characters or less.


So that was it. We have microblogging. Unfortunately, along came Facebook and offered to do all that Twitter could do and more. (130)

Jaiku failed largely because it was invite only, meaning that you couldn't actually start an account without having been invited. (128)

But all is not lost. Objects can microblog too - the Mars Rover has a twitter feed, and so does the River Thames. Clever, huh? (125)

Microblogging hase some advantages over Facebook too. There are fewer security risks, it’s easier to follow people and it's generally freer. (140 exactly!)

The way I see it, we shouldn't compare this to Facebook at all. Facebook is not a blog - it is a social network, made to arrange dates and stuff. People who say that microblogging like Twitter is timewasting drivel have missed the point. Finding out what your friend thinks of the new series of Scrubs, sharing frustration over a new gadget or just saying that your teeth look freakishly white this morning, life is about the little info-cameos from interesting people that get us through the day. Some people do that by phone or face-to-face, some do it across the internet, which is just as valid a method in this day and age.

That is microblogging in a nutshell. I made up this little rhyme to help you remeber (maybe it should be called the Jaiku-haiku). Shout to the world with your tongue all unfurled! Twitter's a hit; go with Twitter, you twit! (titter)
Yes. I am perfectly aware it is shamelessly awful. Could you do better? Hmmm...
See here for other stuff to know about microblogging.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaiku





Another brilliant (but unrelated) video...