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I’ve explored this topic some three or four times chatting with geeky friends. The last time was a couple of days ago after a very nice lunch at El Huarique peruvian seafood restaurant in Miraflores. So I want to elaborate a bit about my reasons but, for the impatient, the basic idea is I do like the whole microblogging concept because I think it adds value to the web and Twitter is perhaps the most widely known microblogging tool today.

So why do I post stuff on Twitter? Because I think it lets me share almost immediatly stuff worth sharing with people who might care about it. Yes, as anyone else I might be posting superfluous stuff are some cryptic message that only matters to me but I try to balance the usefulness of the service as a thought sink and a news wire.

I’ve been using twitter since the first days the service went live and have updated my status around 2600 times since then. I admit I have many times shared stuff that is only relevant to my friends that also happen to follow me or to people living in my city or country but I’ve seen new people follow me regularly, at the rate of one and sometimes two need followers per week. I have now 192 followers which seems to prove I’m getting read, at least by some of them

Many people quit using Twitter because they feel they have too much stuff to read and too little of it is useful for them. It’s the well known signal/noise ration thing. I’ve somewhat solved that problem by just reading the last few pages of the feeds from people I follow only from time to time, when I have some time to do it. For me, microblogging is much a write-oriented activity than a read-oriented one. It works nicely that way for me so I don’t feel it like a big interruption.

The Web was created to share experience and ideas

The World Wide Web was created on top of previously existing Internet infraestructure by a scientist with the single purpose of instantly sharing papers and the details of very costly experiments so teams in the other side of the world could avoid repeating the work. All other uses including porn are posterior I’m sure most web users of today miss this point since they are most likely to have become web surfers for accessing a public service like Hotmail, reading the newspaper for free, get some electronic banking done or sharing pictures with friends and family. So yes, the web should be all about sharing your knowledge and experience with colleages around the world but that didn’t happen for mere mortals until blogging became widespread.

Blogs saved the Web

I can’t trace the phrase to the place I first read it but the idea is this: before blogs and blogging became popular the web was becoming an increasingly boring place where only the corporations were publishing content reflecting their views and opinions. Those days If you were an individual and wanted to push some content to the web you had to be some sort of HTML geek and learn at the very least how to use a web form to upload pages to Geocities if you wanted to avoid the hassle of using FTP. So publishing content was mostly hard to the average Internet user and something only a few geeks knew how to do and the fewer geeks actually were doing. The picture today is very different. Blogging is some sort of viral thing and lots of people have a blog because their friends have a blog or have been inspired to start blogging by reading someone else’s blog. Today the problem does not seem to be the technical details of blogging but finding content worth sharing with the world

Blogs save my day. Everyday.

At least in the world of computer geekery I live day to day blogs are generally a key resource for having some task completed. Blog posts are serving many times this days as the drafts for some documentation Before blogs the only sources for technical help were books, the vast majority of them not freely available on the web, magazine articles, also only a very small part available on the web, public archives or mailing lists or news groups, most available but not generally formatted as articles and irc channels, great for interactivity but not useful for long detailed explanations. Yes, I’m not forgetting the technical articles at public knowledge bases that the big IT transnationals usually have but with the advent of opensource a lot of products you use do not come from corporations and don’t have this kind of knowledge bases available. It is true that blogs are not the only tools that helped improve considerably the general availability of technical articles: Wikis serve today a key role in creating and mantaining community-generated content but they are generally community-owned resources and not private property people get to do as they think it’s best like with their own blogs.

People has been sharing short pieces of text for years

People have been posting links together with a very brief explanations of the content on IRC for ages. If you post even a medium-sized chunk of text on an IRC channel you’re most likely piss someone else off since your text will probably take most of the available screen space rendering the other participant’s messages unreadable. When you do IRC you quickly learn to post in the short using services like Pastebin to make bigger pieces of text available to your peers.

IM users learned quickly to alter their status message to reflect their mood or publicize something. MSN Messenger users came to the point of chatting by continously changing their status in the occassion of the service being broken and not letting the users exchange direct messages.

So my point here is before Twitter and the whole microblogging ball got rolling Internet users had been exchanging self-contained short pieces of text effectively.

Microblogging is a valuable subset of blogging

Microblogging is still very new. By definition it’s all about blogging short pieces of text generally short enough as to have one microblogging post pushed to cellphones with just one SMS message. This is precisely what Twitter offered and since then it has quickly become an extremely popular service, at least among Internet geeks surely not the general public.

You can very accurately think of microblogging as the plain posting of very short self-contained text bodies. By self-contained I mean a piece of text that is not dependent on the reading of some other piece of text in order to understand it’s whole meaning. That’s why microblogging is useful for expressing your mood, sharing a remarkable quote, posting a link and answering a question like Twitter’s What are you doing?

The whole microblogging thing is not dependent on a service like Twitter. It could have been easily implemented just by creating short blog posts under a certain category in order to have a separate syndication feed and have others aggregate it on any feed reader perhaps ignoring the title. Yes, this would lack the SMS and IM gateways but that’s not something that can’t be solved by adding some extre code to the blog engine as a plug-in.

Blogging and microblogging are not just talking to yourself

Comments are as important in a blog as the post body. When someone blogs something that is hot you’ll see how people will comment and add useful additional information, their own experience, corrections, suggestions and possibly challenge the very idea of the post. This is great for the reader and a great service for the casual community of readers that forms around a blog post. When this happens your feed gets added to people’s feed readers and your posts get linked by people’s post having Google bring more and more readers to your blog as an important effect.

I’ve experienced something alike happens with microblogging. If you post stuff that is only relevant to yourself you’ll get no responses and people will become tired of following you removing your stream from their list. When you post useful stuff, interesting ideas or just amusing thoughts you’ll get responses, conversations started and even more followers.

Yes, since the way current microblogging tools work is essentially a feed reader it’s somewhat close to a popularity contest: you’ll end up following those guys who most of the people you follow (e.g. your friends) are also following and you’ll stop being followed if you don’t do the microblogging thing often or mostly post boring stuff.

Blogging is hard, microblogging is easy

That’s exactly why writting a good blog post is so hard and writing a bad microblogging post is so easy Both blogging and microblogging can suck a lot of your time. It’s just they suck it in a completely different way.

Writing a good blog post is not just about having a good idea. You have to match it with a good writing technique and decent style. The length of the article is also key: it must be long enough to engage the user and provide useful details but not that long as to have the user only scan the text or go straight to the conclusions. It sucks your time by writing, reading what you have written, rewriting and correcting and getting the post in good shape. It takes some serious time for most of us. I must be writing this post for at least one hour already.

Writing a good microblogging post instead is much more about picking the right stuff to share. Yes, it also takes skill in writing in a concise way and services like Tinyurl help a lot in fitting long urls in the very reduced space but the good taste on picking what to share perhaps remain the key part of it.

But the thing I find great about microblogging is being able to share something really quickly, almost instantly once you conclude it’s something worth sharing. With microblogging, I have posted links to blog posts, new software or news items just after reading a few lines for friends to pick’em up and have received valuable feedback and comments by the time I had finished reading the piece.

With a blog, you have to invest the time need to round a decent post. Before microblogging became a bit popular I think I was missing sharing many things I wanted to share. I’m the kind of person who takes the time to post something interesting to a forum or mailing list I participate at from time and like to comment with my friends in person stuff I’ve found and I think is useful or noteworthy. For me this microblogging thing is more about accomplishing the same thing but with a new level of efficiency or at least a different dimension.

It says in Spanish “God created the world in six days and in the seventh He twitted.”

Microblogging usage patterns and available tools

In a future post I’d like to explore some microblogging usage patterns including mine and also review some of the available tools. I suspect some of the tools are there only they are not widely known and others simple don’t exist. I’d love to be able to easily read what other microbloggers are saying about Linux, Python or Mac OS X, all of them topics I am interested in but can’t think of a tool helping with that for example.

Conclusions

I find microblogging valuable and it’s benefits worth the price you pay in time. For me, microblogging is just like regular blogging only in a much shorter format so it’s faster and easier to share stuff. The quality of the your posts matters as much as in regular blogging and my advice is to balance the use of the tool for expressing your thoughts, mood and opinions and as a medium to quickly push interesting and valuable stuff to friends and the general public.

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