Characteristics of micro blogging
Micro blogging involves posting of shorter text in one's blog as compared to traditional blogging. Generally, the number of characters that can be present in a micro blog is around 150. Besides letters, a micro blog can also consist of images or videos embedded in it. Anything goes in a micro blog including what the blogger is doing at the moment what are his or her views about any event or a person, though in a limited number of characters.
Popular Micro blogging platforms include Twitter, Tumbler, Beeing and Jaiku. Some of these websites have introduced certain tools and applications which take the user experience to next level. For instance, videos and pictures can be shared on Plurk in a timeline view. Users can share emoticons with Emote.in. Twitter is another popular platform which enables its users to 'follow' each other. This essentially means that one user who is following another user would get an update in case the other one has made any change to its post.
Popular social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace support micro blogging with features such as status updates. The rise of popularity of micro blogging is also being cashed by services like Lifestream and Profilactic that collect micro blogs from various blogs into one list. With websites such as Ping.fm you can post your micro blogs at various social networks.
Use of Micro blogging
Some studies have been conducted in order to understand the usage pattern of users of micro blogs. After one such study which was conducted on 11 million users of popular platform Twitter, it was found out that around ninety percent of blogging activity was performed by only about one-tenth of total users of Twitter. After this study some interesting statistics about uses of micro blogging have emerged which are discussed here.
Online Marketing: Micro blogging sites are popular among marketers as well who want to utilize the ever increasing numbers of users of such sites for marketing their goods or services. The huge fan following of these sites makes them quite attractive for marketers. They get millions of potential customers here and if they are able to capitalize on even a fraction of them, they would be able to reap big benefits.
Real-time news updates: Many microbloggers, or members of such sites, engage in updating news about events as and when they happen. Microbloggers shot into prominence at the time of terrorist attacks in Mumbai, India. At the time of Mumbai attacks microbloggers helped in real time update of events and consolidation of victims of the attacks.
Organizing protests: Public protests are increasingly being hosted on such websites. The most popular protest was against the rogue Iran regime which managed to cling to power after a widely disputed election held in 2009. Protests against national governments and commercial organizations are increasingly being organized on such sites.
Corporate blogs: Big organizations tend to have their blogs so as to reach out to their customers to broadcast their policies and get feedback from existing and potential customers about their products and services.