The Evolution of Micro Blogging in Twitter

Micro blogging in Twitter is one of the best assets that the emerging social networking site has. Micro blogging is a form of multimedia blogging that allows users to send brief text updates or micromedia such as photos and audio clips. They are published can either be viewed by anyone or any group that is chosen by the user. Now, this feature of Twitter is one of the most admired one since it facilitates every user's task of blogging and sending updates.

Twitter didn't really started out as hot as they are today. The fad/trend that they are now were built through the efforts from certain technological precursors. The term microblog came into greater usage or mainstream because of Tumblr and Twitter. The second one is the most popular among vast list of micro blogging sites being developed in from the past years.

In a quest to become the best social networking site, Twitter developed their website by adopting and applying the culture of IRC, IM and SMS. These three were the roots of development in micro blogging.

IRC or Instant relay chat came into existence in 1988, invented by Jarkko Oikarinen. It was the forerunner to instant messaging tools such as Yahoo! Messenger and Google Talk. The IRC community developed a rich language of protocols using special characters to provide instructions from writers to readers. Examples of this protocols are namespace channel and directed message. Twitter is currently studying of the chances to give credit to a tweet being written that was first posted by another twitterer.

Next culture that Twitter adopted is the IM or instant messaging. This taught the new generation of internet users to chat with their friends in real time. It is the “in-the-moment” communication subculture. Instant messaging has been of the most useful and most admired features of social networking sites since the day it was launched. Except from friend's status message, availability of IM keep each parties updated and connected.

The last one to complete the puzzle is the SMS or Short Message Service. Internet and mobile phone come as one. This is called the mobile phone revolution. This became an innovative feature of many social networking sites, like Twitter. SMS is one of the applications in Twitter that has a large market. Mobile phone revolution on the internet gave answer to the great reliance on mobile phones and the call to make communications more convenient. Texting became a legitimate use for a mobile phone and soon became as popular a means of communication as simply talking into the mouthpiece. The maximum length of an 8-bit data message is a familiar 140 characters, which gave rise to the signature constraint of Twitter.

With Twitter combining all these communication culture, micro blogging is now on its finest. But expect this, after some few years, micro blogging will have a new face. Something that will make convenient multimedia blogging more convenient.