Microblogging

The first micro-blogs were known as tumblelogs. The term was coined by programmer why the lucky stiff in a blog post on April 12, 2005, while describing Leah Neukirchen's Anarchaia. Non-Chinese microblogging services are censored in China. Chinese Weibo services such as Sina Weibo are available to the Chinese people, offering similar functionality to X and Facebook. They provide microposting, allow users to comment on each other's posts, allow posting with graphical emoticons, and support inclusion of images, music and video files. A survey by the Data Center of China Internet from 2010 showed that Chinese microblog users most often pursued content that was created by friends or experts in a specific field or was related to celebrities. == Usage ==

Several studies have tried to analyze user behavior on microblogging services. They include extensive studies on Twitter in 2009, by researchers at Harvard Business School and at Sysomos. Results indicated that for services such as Twitter, a small group of active users generate most of the activity. Sysomos' Inside Twitter survey, which was based on more than 11 million users, showed that in 2009, 10% of Twitter users accounted for 86% of all activity. Twitter, Facebook, and other microblogging services have become platforms 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 the general user population, with 15% of marketers following over 2,000 people and only 0.29% of the Twitter public following more than 2,000 people. Microblogging has also become an important source of real-time news updates during socio-political revolutions and crisis situations, such as the 2008 Mumbai terror attacks or the 2009 Iran protests. The short nature of updates allow users to post news items quickly, reaching an audience in seconds. Clay Shirky argues that those services have the potential to result in an information cascade, which prompts fencesitters to turn into activists. Microblogging has noticeably revolutionized the way information is consumed. It has empowered citizens themselves to act as sensors or sources of information that could lead to consequences and influence, or even cause, media coverage. People share what they observe in their surroundings, information about events, and their opinions about topics from a wide range of fields. Moreover, these services store various metadata from these posts, such as location and time. Aggregated analysis of this data includes different dimensions like space, time, theme, sentiment, network structure etc., and gives researchers an opportunity to understand social perceptions of people in the context of certain events of interest. Microblogging also promotes authorship. On the micro-blogging platform Tumblr, the reblogging feature links the post back to the original creator. The findings of a study by Emily Pronin of Princeton University and Daniel Wegner of Harvard University may explain the rapid growth of microblogging. The study suggests a link between short bursts of activity and feelings of joy, power, and creativity. == Issues ==

Microblogging is not without issues, such as privacy, security, and integration. Privacy is arguably a major issue because users may broadcast sensitive personal information to anyone who views their public feed. An example would be Google's Buzz platform, which incited controversy in 2010 by automatically publicizing users' email contacts as "followers". Google later amended those settings. On centralized services, where all of the microblog's information flows through one point (such as servers operated by X (Twitter), privacy has been a concern in that user information has sometimes been exposed to governments and courts without the prior consent of the user who generated such supposedly private information, usually through subpoenas or court orders. Examples can be found in Wikileaks related Twitter subpoenas, as well as various other cases. Security concerns have been voiced within the business world since there is potential for sensitive work information to be publicized on microblogging sites such as Twitter. That includes information that may be subject to a superinjunction. Integration could be the hardest issue to overcome since it can be argued that corporate culture must change to accommodate microblogging. An internet architecture called OStatus has been developed so that microblogging can occur seamlessly across multiple corporate platforms. This protocol has evolved into ActivityPub, on which many platforms making up the Fediverse are based. Users of these platforms are members of a specific instance running one of the software of the Fediverse, which can interoperate as a federated social network, allowing users on different nodes to interact with each other. == Related concepts ==

Live blogging is a derivative of microblogging that generates a continuous feed on a specific web page. Instant messaging and IRC display status but generally only one of a few choices such as available, off-line, away, busy. Away messages, which are displayed when the user is away, form a kind of micro-blogging. In the Finger protocol, the .project and .plan files are sometimes used for status updates similar to microblogging. ==See also==