…Tumblogging and Twittering. The former is a subset of blogging that uses quick, mixed-media posts to create something akin to a digital stream of consciousness, consisting of a homogeneous flow of status updates, links of interest, pictures, text, quotes, and conversations. The premier service - Tumblr - is already used by a growing legion of over 50,000 users per month.
Twitter is a rapidly growing Internet community in which members tell one another what they’re doing right that second. The result is sort of a mini-blog, a thought balloon via text message or posted on the Internet.
David Karp of Tumblr believes this kind of short-form communication is here to stay because people want to talk about themselves — hence the creation of millions of blogs that haven’t been updated in months; we don’t want to have long, drawn-out conversations, the reasoning goes, simply pub talk.
This is blogging that favors short-form data,” he says, alluding to his tool and to Twitter - where each post is limited to 140 characters per post. “You can make 10 posts during the day, as opposed to spending an hour writing one long, editorial post.
Karp says Tumblr is seeing 10,000 posts per hour from its 50,000 members all over the world, with 250,000 visitors simply reading, not posting. Similarly, Twitter has seen huge growth since launch:
Whether these are fads, toys for the ultraconnected or the next MySpace, the two sites signal a form of communication different from what most Web users are accustomed to. Jaiku is a similar service to Twitter that intersects PIM applications with messaging, creating a kind of live phonebook. Some insights into why these services are proving so popular are provided by Marko Ahtisaari, who lists out the following attractors:
1. Silent sociality - checking up on what my friends are up to when convenient, and posting my own state knowing that I won’t be disturbing others (unless they have explicitly asked to be alerted).
2. Small-group sociality - I’m interested in sharing state with a small group I’m nearly always in contact with, what Mimi Ito has called full-time intimate community.
3. Mobile sociality - Jaiku was designed with the mobile “living phonebook” interface in mind.
4. Background sociality - Jaiku allows me to integrate other online identities and feeds (including delicious, flickr and any RSS) into my single jaiku presence feed.
What is interesting about these innovations is the way they constitute a kind of soft convergence, not yet anticipated by Telcos. Users are exploiting the individual strengths of broadband and mobile to fulfil specifc needs and, in turn, exhibit a whole range of new behaviours. Furthermore, these services provide potential increases in ARPU from ramped-up SMS usage.
