Microblogging

Microblogging is a form of blogging using short posts without titles known as microposts[1][2][3] (or status updates on a minority of websites like Meta Platforms').

Microblogs "allow users to exchange small elements of content such as short sentences, individual images, or video links",[1] which may be the major reason for their popularity.

The term was coined by programmer Jonathan Gillette in a blog post on April 12, 2005, while describing Leah Neukirchen's Anarchaia.

[8] Other social networking websites Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, Diaspora, JudgIt and XING, also have their own microblogging feature, better known as "status updates".

[citation needed] 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.

[12] 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.

[15][16] 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.

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.

An example would be Google's Buzz platform, which incited controversy in 2010 by automatically publicizing users' email contacts as "followers".

[28][29][30][31] 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.

[citation needed] An internet architecture called OStatus has been developed so that microblogging can occur seamlessly across multiple corporate platforms.