The term ‚microblogging‘ indicates that the only difference between Twitter and classic blogs is the size. Pretty clearly, this is not the case. It feels like Twitter users are somehow more connected and everything is more interactive. I wrote my thoughts on that in a working paper which I have published now on Sprouts.

The findings suggest that classical blogging and microblogging use the same concepts (channels and items) but differ in the support of interaction between them. See the following figure to see the different forms of interaction in blogging and microblogging:

On the other hand, it seems clear that the foundation for the richer interaction experience of microblogging is its lack of interoperability and its centralistic approach. Please see the working paper for a detailed argumentation:

Böhringer, M. (2009). “Really Social Syndication: A Conceptual View on Microblogging,” . Sprouts: Working Papers on Information Systems, 9(31). http://sprouts.aisnet.org/9-31

Disclaimer: please note that this is a working paper without academic rigor.

As I wrote in the posting Microblogging – What’s next?, I strongly believe that there could be huge value in including non-human information sources to (enterprise) microblogging. The original idea for such a scenario including processes, machines and sensors (see the image for examples from Twitter) reaches back to my master thesis one year ago. It took that time that I finally came up with a term which could name this idea: ubiquitous microblogging.

Obvious, ubiquitous microblogging leans on the well-known research field of ubiquitous computing. While the latter understands ubiquity in a way that artificial computing devices are everywhere in the real world, the meaning of ubiquitous microblogging is that of real world objects being integrated and represented in an artificial computing space. In our definition, ubiquitous microblogging means a microblogging system including everyone and everything in an organisation. Therefore we borrow the conceptual meaning of ‘ubiquitous’ in the sense of its Latin origin ‘everywhere’.

Weiser (1991) in his vision about ubiquitous computing stated that ‘the most profound technologies are those that disappear’. Figuratively speaking, this is also true for ubiquitous microblogging as the goal behind our approach is to hide real world’s information access complexity with providing a flat information space accessible by the easy following-mechanism.

The approach of ubiquitous microblogging has much to do with the search for enterprise use cases of microblogging and a rising number of researchers is thinking about this topic. Michael Rosemann from Queensland University of Technology described how microblogging could be used for business process management. Alexander Dreiling from SAP shows a prototype for collaborative modelling with Google Wave (is Wave microblogging? I am going to discuss this question in a future posting). But the other way round is also possible, as the guys from Akibot show with their microblogging bot using NLP (Natural Language Processing). And finally, our research group is currently involved in several microblogging projects including ‘microblogging for logistics’ (think of tweeting RFID chips).

To implement a full ubiquitous microblogging scenario, still lots of work has to be done. Today’s examples from Twitter are individual programmed prototypes. In terms of enterprise-wide ubiquitous microblogging we need much more sophisticated architectural approaches. Currently, we are thinking about how such a ‘microblogging middleware’ could look like.

References:
Weiser, M. (1991). The Computer for the 21st Century. Scientific American, 265(3), 94-104.