First there was blogging and Web 2.0 and the whole social networking thing. Now we have microblogging which has gained world wide notoriety over the past 2 years, most noticeably due to the rise and fall of Twitter, which was the primary microblogging provider until it had to cancel its service to the United Kingdom. It would seem that with the explosion of Me Media, updating your friends and family on everything you're doing, every second of the day is an attractive prospect for many. Finding its routes in Facebook's status updates, microblogs consist of little more than 150 characters and are generally short banal statements or brief questions concerning friends whereabouts, such as, "im on the bus" or the all too common "what's everyone doing tonight?"



Not that it doesn't have its practical uses. In the corporate arena of business SMS, microblogging is often used to inform a group of employees on a short but significant change in the itinerary. In the realms of citizen journalism it can be used to activate news crews or inform the relevant staff of an important development in a breaking story. In addition, because you can post these brief updates about your life changing occurrences, vocational incidents or your really, really deep personal revelations via a number of digital media devices, it can be a versatile portal of information. Using portable media such as your mobile phone or smart phone rather than just your web browsers, email, mobile and instant messaging, you can reach a vast range of people on a global scale which in itself is quite impressive. And this is the imperative point. The power of Twitter lies in its cumulative effect. Over months of receiving these trivial updates you can get a very detailed understanding of your friends and colleagues through hearing of their thoughts and movements on a day to day basis.

It all adds to this collective unconscious that is accumulating from the global sharing of information via the internet and social media. With regular Tweets your presence can be felt increasingly, and by more and more people in a wider range of places dotted around the world. If we can get beyond the hipster chic of mobile social networking and get involved we may see what all the 18 - 30 year olds are twittering about. And although Twitter now only provides for its members in the United States, Canada and India (due to its unsustainable business model) there has been a whole heap of similar start ups offering the same package.