Many web applications nowadays are all about truncating activities and taking up less time. Blogs are as common as grass nowadays, but some smart developers created a condensed version of the common medium: microblogging!
Microblogs limit posts to generally 200 characters or less. The text restriction allows the application to be used easily via mobile web. Texting, chat, and email can be used to update microblogs, ensuring easy and quick entries from almost anywhere.
But do we really need microblogs? Aren’t they just more web app junk? This is not necessarily the case, when you take a moment to think about how many users handle Facebook: quick updates on their external or internal lives (“Joe Schmo is eating bbq” or “Jane Smith is contemplating particle physics”), sharing media such as mp3s, commenting on a linked article, or embedding streaming video from YouTube. Microblogging allows all of this in a brand-new format suitable for frequent notices at breakneck speed.
Twitter is currently the most popular microblog site around, but an intriguing competitor is Pownce, which was developed by Digg founder Kevin Rose. Whereas Twitter is limited to text posts only, Pownce allows for event invitations, link posts, and media file entries. Its appeal may be based on the fact that it’s sort of like FriendFeed, which also lets you share online multimedia. Pownce also has a mobile version, and there is a desktop extension that can be downloaded.
It will be interesting to see how popular these microblogging sites will become. No doubt that professional bloggers and other Internet-addled fools (ahem) will be chained to Twitter and Pownce, but what about the average end-user?
As for online marketers, applications like Twitter are great exciting fodder for blog posts. Not that we can judge or anything.
