Microblogging

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.

Facebook has recently re-launched its homepage with a real-time feed. All I’ve been hearing is complaints about the new format, and people saying they’re copying Twitter. I’ve been waiting some weeks for people to get used to it and for the complaints to stop – but they’re still there. So why did Facebook re-launch their homepage, what are they hoping to achieve, and what’s making users so unhappy? Is it just the usual „new is bad“, or is there more to it?

Ben Parr from Mashable explains the difference between Facebook and services like Twitter:

„On Twitter and FriendFeed, it’s not only easy to find new and interesting people, it is encouraged. Facebook, because it was designed from the start as a closed ecosystem, has not been able to encourage people to become friends with new people, just the people in their personal sphere. This is important because staying in the same ecosystem can become tiresome and Facebook could see its position slip away due to weariness.“

Does Facebook want to become more like Twitter? Personally, I use Facebook for private purposes only. I like its closed ecosystem, because only friends can see what I’m posting – and on Facebook, all my online friends are real offline friends too. It’s a place for me to keep up to date on what my friends are doing.

Twitter on the other hand, I mainly use for work. I engage with people who do something related to my work, post interesting links that could be relevant for them and look for content that could be interesting for our website or for me personally. I use the two websites for totally different purposes. On Twitter, I want to find new people and I want people to find me. On Facebook, I want to stay within my closed circle of friends.

Chris Thorpe and Becky Fishman of Jaggeree write: „ One of the cleverest aspects to “old Facebook” is what I often term activity scrobbling. The capture and display in an activity stream of your implicit actions. This for me is in many ways more fascinating in terms of keeping the heartbeat of close friendship together than the mechanic of the status update. The pictures someone has uploaded or tagged. The applications they use. The links they posted. The reason why I find these more fascinating is that they’re better conversation pieces more often than not when in real life I see the person who “scrobbled” them. While it’s lovely to be able to comment on a status as an immediate feedback within the Facebook interface; it’s like banter. It’s not the nucleus or seed of a discussion.“

One of the major points of complaint seen on Facebook is that the stream on the homepage is not relevant. I think I would agree with that. My homepage is currently full of updates on someone’s „Cities I’ve visited“ maps, another friend’s Bejeweled Blitz application stats and a lot of messages from Plurk – even though I dropped Plurk all the way to the bottom in the filter. Another major complaint point is that it’s hard to find stuff. Have you ever tried getting to the groups section from the homepage? The fastest way I know is to do a search and then get to groups from there. Not the easiest way.

Facebook has collected feedback and is planning on improving the homepage with some changes soon. The old Facebook won’t be coming back though, so it’s time we all learn to use the filter so we can stop going through pages of Vampire, Mafia and Bejeweled Blitz games before we read something interesting.

Facebook will probably continue being successful, whether people like the new homepage or not. They have such a huge userbase, people will find it hard to stop using it – they would miss out on a lot of info on their friends that they’re used to. If their goal is to get users to spend more time on the site though, I’m not sure they succeeded. A friend of mine recently wrote she „ would like to thank Facebook for totally screwing up their platform. I now spend 95% LESS time on Facebook, leaving 95% more time to waste elsewhere!“.