With all the celebrities launching charity campaigns on Twitter and fighting over who has the most followers, Twitter and microblogging in general is starting to become mainstream. In just a few months, it turned from a geek place to a media outlet for Hollywood stars, politicians and bands. Ashton Kutcher’s campaign to get over a million followers was posted on billboards all over the US – much to the dismay of other Twitter users who felt he was „cheating“in his quest to reach a million users before CNN does by using other media to attract followers.
For some of the early adopters, Twitter is already a little too mainstream, and they’re starting to look for new trends. One new service that is already quite popular is company-internal microblogging, we use Yammer and I’ve really grown to like it over the last few months. Our team is spread all over the world, and Yammer lets us share interesting links, opinions and news without filling up our email accounts. Since a company’s Yammer account is a closed group, what we share stays within the company and does not get read by anyone else.
Other services have started what’s being called nanoblogging. Rather than the 140 characters you get with Twitter, nanoblogging offers you as little as 26 characters. While the fictional service „Flutter“ was just a joke making fun of Twitter (I highly recommend the video – hilarious!), services like Adocu really offer nanoblogging.
Would Flutter work? It lets you post up to 26 characters („one entire alphabet“). This sentence has 32 characters. The bit.ly short URLs I usually use when tweeting a link have 19 characters. And replying to someone? @edwina plus the obligatory space behind it: 8 characters gone and you’re left with 18 measly keyboard strokes. Delivering an actual MESSAGE with 26 characters? My opinion - not gonna happen. (I could not have fluttered that last sentence – it had 30 characters.)
Adocu approaches nanoblogging a little differently: Rather than limiting the number of characters, it limits you to one word by only allowing you to post characters, numbers and links. No spaces are allowed, but the limit of characters is quite generous. That’s not much of an upside though, considering the longest word in the English language has only 30 characters (pseudopseudohypoparathyroidism, in case you’re wondering) and would almost fit into a Flutter message. It could make Germans quite happy though: Rindfleischetikettierungsüberwachungsaufgabenübertragungsgesetz is in fact a real word – with 63 characters (and still no the longest one in the German language)! Though who would ever want to read your updates if you talk about laws on the delegation of the supervision of labelling of beef?
So, my conclusion is, nanoblogging will not be the next hype after Twitter. Just like with cell phones, the times of making things smaller/shorter is over – quality is the key. Twitter’s 140 character limit is a great way to make people come to a point without much talking around, but limiting message length even more is not the answer.
