My favorite social sites for… Micro Blogging

This week I figured I’d go off on all of the sites I like, so I can give you a better understanding of which sites you should check out. As usual, I’m not writing a post for the rest of the social media intelligentsia here – we seem to give each other more than enough digital ink. Instead, this is for the lady in the marketing department, or the guy running his own business, or that other one over there who just wants to know how to get started with all of this social media jazz.

Of course, if other people have other services they like, I’m always open to hearing opposing opinions. For now, though, I’m going to be completely self absorbed in this.

Micro blogging, as you may or may not already know, is taking off. Mostly because you get to keep a blog – or online diary – but you aren’t expected to put that much into it. It restricts the number of characters any post can be, so the challenge sometimes becomes not writing enough information, but cramming your thought down to 140 characters or less.

And there are a LOT of micro blogs. The differences between them aren’t always that great, either. Twitter is the most famous of them right now, and it certainly has the most users. To be honest it isn’t a favorite of mine. The system is famous for crashing, because of all of the users but the limited bandwidth they have.

The bigger problem, I think, has more to do with micro blogs in general. They become competitions to see who get the most people to follow their profile, where people send out messages begging to be followed or friended or whatever that particular site calls it, and people you’d like to talk with may not friend you back because they want to limit the number of people they are following or friending… it’s more like a game than a communication tool sometimes.

Then again, with the number of users Twitter has, and Friendfeed is getting, it’s worth it to be in the game with the latest program.

My personal favorite micro blogging tool, however, is Brightkite. Like Twitter, you have a limited space in which to put a micro blog post. However, you also update the site with your immediate location. Privacy settings can be used if you don’t want to let the world know your home or work address, but otherwise you can make your Brightkite page a document of your trips and travels. You can also post photographs, ostensibly of where you are. When I went to see Devo in Del Mar, CA this weekend, I used the service to record my trip. While my pictures were, frankly, awful, (owing to a cell phone camera that is garbage,) I do like having the trip laid out for me to revisit whenever I want to.

Jaiku is another servicer I particularly like these days. It is invite only at the moment, but should be getting a wide release soon since it is a Google project. It’s basically just micro blogging as well, but you can add the RSS feeds of the other sites you’re using. In that way it’s rather like Friendfeed, which is actually a collection of your RSS feeds but lets you post little FriendFeed comments…

Anyway, if you’re looking to get your feet wet, obviously you need to start with Twitter. Once you get bored with that, though, I suggest you move onto Brightkite. Brightkite updates can be cross posted onto your Twitter account, so you know, so if you do decide to switch over it isn’t as though you’ll be “abandoning” your Twitter presence.

written at September 2nd, 2008 and is filed under Social Networking. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.