Microblogging is a passive broadcast medium in the form of blogging. A microblog differs from a traditional blog in that its content is typically much smaller, in both actual size and aggregate file size. A microblog entry could consist of nothing but a short sentence fragment, an image or embedded video.

As with traditional blogging, microbloggers post about topics ranging from the simple, such as "what I'm doing right now," to the thematic, such as "sports cars." Commercial microblogs also exist, to promote websites, services and/or products, and to promote collaboration within an organisation.

Some microblogging services offer features such as privacy settings, which allow users to control who can read their microblogs, or alternative ways of publishing entries besides the web-based interface. These may include text messaging, instant messaging, E-mail, or digital audio.

Services

The first microblogs were known as tumblelogs. The term was coined by why the lucky stiff in a blog post on April 12, 2005, while describing Christian Neukirchen's Anarchaia.

Jason Kottke described tumblelogs on October 19, 2005:

However, by 2006 and 2007, the term microblog came into greater usage for such services provided by Tumblr and Twitter. In May 2007, 111 microblogging sites were counted internationally. Among the most notable services are Twitter, Tumblr, Plurk, Emote.in, Beeing, Jaiku and identi.ca. More recently, varieties of services and software with the feature of microblogging have been developed. Plurk has a timeline view which integrates video and picture sharing. Emote.in has a concept of sharing emotions, built over microblogging, with a timeline. Pownce, developed by Digg founder Kevin Rose among others, integrated microblogging with file sharing and event invitations. Pownce was merged into SixApart in 2008.

Other leading social networking websites Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, and XING also have their own microblogging feature, better known as status updates.

With the growth of microblogging, many users want to maintain presence in more than one or more social networks. Services such as Lifestream and Profilactic will aggregate microblogs from multiple social networks into a single list. Services such as Ping.fm will send out your microblog to multiple social networks..

Usage

Several studies, most notably by Harvard Business School and Sysomos, have tried to analyze the usage behavior of Microblogging services. Many of these studies show that for services such as Twitter, there is a small group of active users contributing to most of the activity. Sysomos' Inside Twitter survey, based on more than 11 million users, shows that 10% of Twitter users account for 86% of all activity.

Twitter, Facebook and other microblogging services are also becoming a platform for marketing and public relations, with a sharp growth in the number of social media marketers. The Sysomos study shows that this specific group of marketers on Twitter is much more active than general user population, with 15% following more than 2,000 people. This is in sharp contrast to only 0.29% of overall Twitter users who follow more than 2,000 people.

Microblogging services have also emerged as an important source of real-time news updates for recent crisis situations, such as Mumbai terror attacks or Iran protests. The short nature of updates allow users to post news items quickly in real-time, reaching its audience in seconds.

The findings of a study by Emily Pronin of Princeton University and Harvard University's Daniel Wegner have been cited as a possible explanation for the rapid growth of microblogging. The study suggests a link between short bursts of activity and feelings of elation, power and creativity.

Microblogging for organizational usage

Users and organizations can set up their own microblogging service: open source and free software is available for this purpose. Hosted microblogging platforms are also available for commercial and organizational use.

Microblogging has the potential to become a new informal communication medium, especially for collaborative work within organizations . Over the last few years communication patterns have shifted primarily from face-to-face communication to more online communication in email, IM, and other tools. However, some argue that email is now a slow and inefficient way to communicate. For instance, time-consuming 'email chains' can develop, whereby two or more people are involved in lengthy communications for simple matters, such as arranging a meeting. The 'one to many' broadcasting offered by microblogs is thought to increase productivity by circumventing this.

Another implication of remote collaboration is that there are fewer opportunities for face to face informal conversations. However, microblogging has potential to support informal communication among co-workers. Many individuals like sharing their whereabouts and status updates with microblogging.^[]

Microblogging is therefore is expected to improve the social and emotional welfare of the workforce, as well as streamlining the information flow within the organization. It can increase opportunities to share information, help realise and utilise expertise within the workforce, and help build and maintain common ground between co-workers. As microblogging use continues to grow every year, it is quickly becoming a core component of Enterprise Social Software.

Issues with microblogging

Some issues with microblogging are privacy, security, and integration.

Privacy is arguably a major issue, because users may broadcast sensitive personal information to anyone who views their public feed. Microblog platform providers can also cause privacy issues, through altering or presetting users' privacy options, in a way users feel compromises their personal information. An example would be Google’s Buzz platform, which incited controversy in 2010 by automatically publicising users’ email contacts as ‘followers’.Google later amended these settings.

Security concerns have been voiced within the business world, since there is potential for sensitive work information to be publicised on microblogging sites such as Twitter. Integration could be the hardest issue to overcome, since it can be argued that corporate culture must change to accommodate microblogging.^[]

Email vs. Microblogging

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 microblogging.

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

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