I have seen recently an overdose of microblogging services. I detected 6 so far. But among the largest are Twitter, Pownce, and Jaiku. I have personally tried Twitter and Pownce, the first one with more enthusiasm since I have more followers. Twitter has definitively more users than pownce since pownce is newer and it is currently only invitation-based. The way I got into the service was by submiting my email and in three days I got my invitation code directly from pownce. I don’t have any followers and I’m not following anyone yet. Since I have only three updates by now my account is not extremely attractive and most of my friends think this microblogging think is stupid and a complete lost of time. But I’m not sure.
Maki in his blog Dosh Dosh wrote this article about the topic. He says there are good ways of taking advantage of these services to bring traffic to your own website.
As with all other social networks or websites, I tend to see these micro-blogging services as a means to generate exposure for websites and businesses, particularly because they can send traffic through the insertion of relevant links.
I think all social network services are a good way to generate traffic online. But I see in microblogging some bigger advantages than in other services. Such as the fact that you can syncronize your website with your blog to keep it update. For my blog I use this plugin which has worked fine for me. But there are other alternatives for twitter. I used this wordpress plugin which is more like a sidebar widget but here there is a list of 10 twitter tools for wordpress(the article is in spanish but the links are completely understandable). Besides the obvious advantage of getting your website updated easily, you can also make friends, and if you have a big amount of people following you you can actually ask questions and people may answer to them. So its a great communication device where you can make quick questions and recieve quick replies. This helps me a lot in blogging, beacuse sometimes I have some doubt about some unknown topic for me and I just have to post it in twitter and in a couple minutes the answer is waiting for me. But to be honest I liked Pownce much more so I think I will stick to it and try to bring my friends to pownce. Also you can upload files and create events. I think events is an overkill but is good to have the feature available.
I think the future of microblogging is not really clear. Maybe it is destined to disappear. But I honestly think it will grow to become an important part of peoples life. The thing that makes microblogging attractive is that you don’t have to take a long time to update it. You just say what are you in to. It is fast, easy, and fun. Some people either don’t have time to update a blog or are just too lazy to do it. But microblogging is a cool alternative.
I have seen how a friend of mine uses its computer. She turn it on, opens up MSN, firefox and the Microsoft Word to make the homework. Shes always in MSN chatting with his buddies and then she updates her metroflog . She told me she likes metroflog because it is really easy to do. Just upload a picture and write something cheesy and that is all. The only things she deslike is uploading the picture, she has too much trouble finding a picture to upload. That is my point. People don’t want to take a hassle of looking for a picture, editing it and then uploading. The only thing they want is to put their cheesy phrase. Just like MSN personal message. People love to update their personal message, they put there where they are going, what they are doing, chessy phrases and all sort of stuff. Microblogging is just for that but far more powerful and of course, it can be updated from nearly every popular Instant messaging system.
Microblogging service are not a lost of time, they are good, I think they will keep expanding and fast. They are good for communications and for keeping in touch with your buddies. So I say go microblogging go!
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