Twitter started as a web application dedicated to the answering of a single question: “what are you doing ?“. However important and fascinating as the answers to this question may be, I would chase away with a stick anyone trying to convince me to bet my money on this concept. It’s a good thing nobody bothered, since Twitter, Jaiku, Pownce and their like, are the talk of the town nowadays.
It seems these services have become more of a micro blogging platforms than anything else. Micro blogging posts are not necessarily limited to answering “what are you doing ?” but can rather deal with any subject.
Why people do micro blog posts ? Why settle for 140 character limit, tinyurls and no pictures when you can easily use off-the-shelf blog system and avoid all these limitations ?
A possible explanation is that writing micro blog posts is less demanding and thus less frightening to most people. In order to write a 1-2 liner about anything, you don’t have to think things over, no preparations or research, just spill out whatever is on your soul. That makes this medium a lot more accessible to many people who look for a place to express their creativity but do not have the time or ability to write a full blown blog post.
This also explains why there are some top notch bloggers out there that are also micro blogging (e.g. TechCrunch, Guy Kawasaki etc.). Why should a person excelling in the blog sphere with lots of subscribers get into the habit of micro blogging as well ? Same answer as above (minus the ability part :)): the medium is a lot more accessible and less time consuming.
However, the lack of the above mentioned also dramatically degrades the quality of micro blog posts compared to the already controversial quality of the regular blog posts, making sifting the good posts out of the muck a lot tougher.
Besides authoring micro blog posts, there are different kinds of complementary services aimed to help generate content for these micro blog services. One I started to use recently with my Twitter is twitterfeed. twitterfeed provides bloggers the ability to publish their regular blog posts on Twitter with a tinyurl to the original post. Another such service is TwittyTunes which enables FoxyTunes users to post their currently playing song on their Twitter. All these multitude of services provide an added value for users of micro blog services since they ease the generation of content making micro blog services even more accessible and thus even more successful.
