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.

Our enterprise microblogging cases study “Towards an understanding of social software: the case of Arinia” has been accepted for HICSS. HICSS is a leading Information Systems conference taking place in Koloa (Hawaii).

Here is the  abstract:

“This paper presents the case of Arinia, a custom made piece of social software with strong similarities to today’s microblogging applications. Arinia has been in use in a medium-sized technology company for more than 10 years; therefore, it is considered that the software is a valuable source of insights into the underlying principles of microblogging in an enterprise context. Due to the unique nature of the case we used an interpretive approach to learn about Arinia, its users and their contexts, involving semi-structured interviews, a survey, quantitative usage data and an excerpt from the posting base in order to achieve a comprehensive view on the case. The results suggest that there is reasonable potential in sharing micro-level information inside organizations. In particular, the findings provide evidence of enabling factors and allow us to introduce the concept of the ‘information food chain’. Together, these findings present a foundation for further research on current microblogging applications.”

The citation will be as follows:

Barnes, Stuart J.; Böhringer, Martin; Kurze, Christian; Stietzel, Jacqueline: Towards an understanding of social software: the case of Arinia, in: Proceedings of the 43nd Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS-43), Koloa, Kauai, Hawaii, 05.-08. Januar 2010, in press.

Yesterday evening I found a very interesting new research paper (via the Twitter search for ‘RT microblogging’). It was presented by Daniel R. Sandler at IPTPS09 on 21 April and deals with decentralized microblogging:

Daniel R. Sandler and Dan S. Wallach. Birds of a FETHR: Open, Decentralized Micropublishing. 8th International Workshop on Peer-to-Peer Systems (IPTPS ‘09) April 21, 2009, Boston, MA, 2009. [BibSonomy: microblogging p2p] URL

Wow. At first that was quite shocking as one of my current research projects deals with the same thing. On the other hand it is great to find researchers with the same interests and thoughts. And: a nearer look at their work shows that they have a different solution for the same problem.

The first part of the paper is a great motivation for decentralized microblogging. They show the disadvantages of Twitter’s monolithic architecture and I strongly agree with them. However, their solution is a new protocol, ‘FETHR’, which has to be spoken by all applications in their decentralized microblogging space. Further, via FETHR the microblogging postings are sent to the subscribers (rather than fetched by the subscribers).

Personally, I strongly believe that the big advantage of microblogging is its characteristics of blogging enhanced with a social network (following/followers, @-refers, replies) and combined with the publish-subscribe-mechanism. There currently exist wide-spread standards in the web which could help us implementing decentralized microblogging. In my opinion there is no need for a new protocol.

However, they wrote a great paper, they go in the right direction and they were the first to publish their approach. Kudos! I am looking forward to future discussions on the topic!