Micro-blogging is all about posting small
digital contents—text, pictures, video and links—on the Internet. In short, it is a combination of
blogging and instant messaging. Micro-blogging websites allow users to share a
message of 140 or less character, a video of 12 seconds or less duration, short
links or individual images with online followers.
Twitter is the most famous micro-blogging
website. It allows users to update their messages in 140 or less characters. The
website is increasingly becoming popular because the list of celebrities
joining the site is growing each day and everyone out there wants to know what these
celebrities are doing. The site has been in news for many controversial tweets
by famous personalities. A few tweets that grabbed headlines and caused a ripple
effect include Shahsi Tharoor’s calling ‘Economy Class’ a ‘Cattle Class’, Lalit
Modi’s tweet on Indian Premiere League (IPL) and many more. The tweet that made the biggest news of the
last year was from a man from Pakistan. Sohaib Athar (@ReallyVirtual)
live-tweeted the raid in which terrorist Osama bin Laden was killed.
There are certain things we should know
about micro-blogging. There are a few must-know terms related to micro-blogging.
One of them is hash tag (#). Tweeter
users (generally called tweeple) must have seen the hash tag often in tweets.
Hash tags allow an online community to easily stream a particular subject. It
is a community-driven practice of tagging an individual tweet by using a hash
in front of the tag such as putting #Indiancricket in a tweet about Indian
Cricket. It also makes the tweet easily searchable online. Another term is re-tweet, it is used when you update
someone else’s tweet on your page. ‘@’ is the sign used for specifying that a
message is for a particular individual.
People using Tweeter has developed a terminology. They use tweeple for people using twitter, twaffic is used for users’ traffic on the site, twalking is used for tweeting while
walking and twitticism is used for witticism used in tweet updates. There are several
other terms and many are being added by its users.
The micro-blogging phenomenon is not limited
to sharing text updates. 12seconds.com is
a micro-blogging video website. 12 Seconds limit the length of uploads to just
12 seconds. Making a video that’s interesting but is only 12 seconds can be a
bit of challenge. Currently, they only offer integration with Facebook and Twitter.
Some other websites such as Pluckr, Tumblr,
Posterous, Plerb and Sweeter are also
known among online users for their distinctive features. There are many sites
such as twitpic, pikchur, twitgoo and others which allow users to share their
pictures on Twitter.
There are many sites which provide an
application through which you can shorten a Universal Resource Locator
(URL)—you want to share with online pals. Some sites such as bit.ly, tinyurl,
ow.ly and goo.gl provide an online tool for shortening URLs. These sites are
useful because many URLs exceed the character limit.
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