What is Microblogging?

Microblogging is a portmanteau of the words micro and blogging. From the words themselves we can assume that microblogging has something to do with updating or sharing one's views in smaller scale. Or simply put shorter forms of blogging.

The idea behind it, is that it is supposed to make people know what you are doing, without taking too much of their time. Microblogging allows the subscriber of the microblogs to make brief updates, usually a maximum 140 characters. And these updates can either be viewed by everyone, or by a select group. They can either be submitted via the internet, through email or even through instant messaging/SMS.

Made immensely popular by Twitter, which was launched in July 2006, microblogging has found its niche in the world wide web. To date, there are quite a few platforms that provide microblogging. The more notable are twitter, plurk, and identi.ca.

Having been made popular, microblogging can even be found in popular social networking sites such as myspace and facebook, in what can also be known as status updates. Status updates provide a similar service to a netizen. Where everyone in your social network is updated in what you are up to in 140 characters or less.