Adventures in Micro-Blogging

I thought I'd jot a few lines down regarding something that I've been experimenting with. The term is micro-blogging. Blogging itself is fairly new to a lot of people, but micro-blogging is even more foreign to a lot of people. Micro-blogging is like blogging, except that it's very brief status messages or thoughts that you can contain within a 140 character message. Micro-blogging sites are popping up everywhere and have become very popular. Twitter.com and identi.ca are two of the biggies.

I never thought I'd get into blogging, much less micro-blogging. When I first saw what micro-blogging was, I thought "what a waste of time". But then I experimented and found some value. From a community perspective, it feels good to be able to keep up with what friends (or acquaintances) are doing on a moment to moment basis. Twitter and identi.ca, as well as most of the other micro-blog sites, provide almost instantaneous updates. So you make an update, and then whenever someone "following" you (or subscribed to your 'feed') updates their browser window, they see your most recent update.

Since there are so many micro-blogging sites, I think it's a bit early to tell which one is going to take off. Which one will end up being the "VHS" of the industry. To hedge my bets, I looked around and found an assortment of tools for updating multiple micro-blogging sites. Currently, I'm working with ping.fm as well as hellotxt.com. I'm not sure which one I really like, but I do like the features that both are trying to provide.

What these sites do is allow you to post one time, and they take your message, and post to all of your micro-blogging sites. So from one point, I can type my quick little message, click on the "Send" button and the message gets sent out to Twitter, identi.ca, hi5.com, Facebook, Myspace, pownce, linkedin, plaxo, plurk, brightkite, beemood, and a few other sites.

About the only trouble is that from time to time, these micro-blog sites might be down or "constipated" for a few seconds, and so the message might not actually get posted to Twitter or one of your other sites, but typically will be posted to most. What I like about hellotxt currently, is that it tells you if it failed on any, which gives you the opportunity to repost only to that one if you wish. Overall, I like ping.fm better, but I like that one feature of hellotxt enough to continue using it.

I haven't found a site that monitors all of the micro-blog sites for me yet, but hellotxt makes an attempt to monitor a few. I currently tend to just monitor twitter for now, because that's the site that most of my friends are on, but identi.ca is growing in popularity and a few of my friends are moving over to it.

And of course, there's still the myspace and facebook folks, so my updates (140 characters or less) go there as well.

Will I do this micro-blogging long-term? I don't know, but for now, I think it's kinda cool to be able to keep up with what some of my friends are doing during the day. Some of these folks I haven't seen in years, but I can still keep up with their day to day activities.