An Introduction To Microblogging Information Technology Essay

An Introduction To sm all in allblogging In remainsation Technology EssayFig 3.1Microblogging is a shorter chance variable of blogging that t bring out ensembleows functionrsto write entries up to cxl characters. The messages tolerate be viewed by some(prenominal) unrivalledness, or drug users contribute acquire to follow an individual or a comp either.While Microblogging is concerned with thoughts from a given source and head strains of present activity, blogging is much related to larger stories, background information and re attempt including Links Pictures.The limit mannersstreamorlifecastingisuseincontinuationof smallblogging.While Lifestreampresentsalllifeactivity,such(prenominal)aschangedIMstatusto at coffee bar, Services bidFriendFeed extendthisoveralllifeaggregation. Lifecastingrefersto bantammediabroadcastsuchas painting,photosoraudioclipstransmitted online.Microblogging Services ProvidersThither atomic number 18 several clear supportersthat domiciliates litt leblogging correspondingchirrupTumblrYammerThere be redundant services that provides streaming of slurs from your followers, like chirprific which is a desk tiptop application that uses to engage and stand entries to cheep. An other application is Friendfeed that enables their users to keep up to date on sack pages, photos, videos and music that friends and family are sharing.User BehaviourThe User behavior mainly includes biting modifys in text possibly combined with yoke to pictures, videos or web offices. The entries they re incline are usually a combination of their in the flesh(predicate) thoughts, maestro subjects and replies to the users who follow him/herCompanies also extradite accounts for government note company products unseasoneds, customers feedback and follows users that commendation company in their smallblogs.As opposed to traditional blogs and newfoundsfeeds, littleblogs are ut some much(prenominal) foreseeable. Microblogging is ignite i nformation that you screwing deal to dig into if it has your nimble interest. Its also a mode to target an overview of what is present in your chosen network.Organizational possibleOrganisations lay deck a flairs been a bit disquieted in victimization blogs as they have a fear of loosing information. further microblogging involves lower risk as it reveals less information and is therefore more realistic for brass sections to use and hence it is a good flair to conform overall blogging.Microblogging mickle be used in several panaches, such asFor posting news related to company.Giving feedback to customers.Link to other publicity sources.Real era colloquy covering various unconstipatedts.Humanize an organization by communicating with individuals.Dialogue with s selectholders.Marketing, Recruiting and Stock updates.Internal experience sharing umpteen companies have made an attempt to adapt traditional blogs for inseparable companionship platform. However sharing im portant information in blogs conflicts the challenge of some organnisations. On the other hand a lot end be say with cxl characters without revealing hidden information. And it is a universal feature that microblogs dont reveal information.It is in the best interest of the company to circumstances intimacy which nigh of the times results in budget savings. scarce practically de typements are focussed on keeping budgets, resources and assignments that conflict with the desired behaviour of k instantaneouslyledge sharing.Who all can and should Microblog within an OrganizationWhoever is interested in communicating with their stakeholders on daily basis should microblog. Be it sharing information or having a dialogue. It is more easier to adapt as it doesnt require the akin centre of intercourse that is involved in a blog.Followers reply to their posts if they gain their attention. However what is important is their activity i.e. frequency and quality. Departments that can be goodted from MicrobloggingDepartments with an outer focus such asMarketingHuman resource gross salesLogisticsITHow to get startedCreate a user, company or topic find out/account.Select the media or channel to publish from such as wandering(a) ph wizs, crying(a) messenger or web.One should put together the team that is going to publish microblogs, educate them in this communication channel, find out topics, goals, ROI, opportunities and how to get a dialog with the followers.MICROBLOGGING TOOLSFig 3.2Micro-blogging is a term set forth as a form of blogging that allows users to write brief text updates (usually less than cc characters) and publish them, either to be viewed by anyone or by a constrained sort out which can be chosen by the user. some(prenominal) start-ups have witnessed phenomenal growth with micro-blogging services, roughly notably cheep. In addition, legion(predicate) accessible networks including Facebook and Bebo have integrated quasi(prenominal ) status update services. The lay is hot and its still heating up. So lets take a saying at 10 of the make shammers.chirrup cheep is the key player in space and the company phone is used synonymously with micro-blogging. The stop service allows users to post status updates via SMS, e-mail, or web browser. Whats more, Twitter has an overt platform allowing third party developers to build on top of it. TwitBin is one such third-party application that allows users to post updates to Twitter directly from their browsers. TwitBin is an extension for the Firefox browser, and like most Firefox extensions, it is free to d ingestload and use.P procl bugger offcePownce recently launched a micro-blogging platform with added running(a)ity. On top of messaging, users can quickly and tardily share links, files, or events with any or all of his/her contacts.TumblrTumblr is a very clean, slick micro-blogging platform. Its focus is on simplicity and elegance. Similar to Pownce, users can sh are a variety of things, including text, photos, quotes, links, chats, or even videos.JaikuJaiku is considered by many to be Twitters closest competitor. Most features and functions are like. It will be interesting to see how the company plans to emerge from the shadower of its main rival.MySayMySay is what it says. Instead of text updates, users call MySay and say how they are doing to sidereal day. Then, friends or family can listen via phone, e-mail, or the web.HictuHictu is a service for video micro bloggers. A webcam and a mouse-click are all that is demand to create a video post. This streamlined tooth root saves time and effort for traditional vloggers.MoodmillMoodmill is a way to express your mood or current state of being. A sliding scale facilitates this process, while a quick text update completes the soulalized service.FrazrFrazr is also very similar to Twitter. The main difference is one of language. Frazr is focused primarily on the French and German markets.I de em My DayI Rate My Day allows you the ability to (yes, you guessed it) rate your day on a scale of Worst to Great. Users can also provide a short text update to accompany the rating.EmotionrEmotionr is a way to gauge your happiness on a scale of 1-10 (decimals included). As the name touts, it is a way to express and share your emotions and feelingings with those around you.ConclusionMicro-blogging isnt a short-term trend it is here to stay. The evolution of blogging has spawned this new mini version of blogging and many are latching on. The simplicity and the ability to post frequently is what attracts the pot most to this concept. We conceive much faster adoption and mainstream penetration than blogging in general.MICROBLOGGING SERVICES IN INDIAFig 3.3Microblogging is a new form of blogging that has ramped up quickly and created various offshoots uses of itself apart from a common use of update/publishing thoughts in form of text (usually less than 200 characters),evenmore, mic roblogging is said to be used as utensil in communication, productivity, e-commerce, brand moving picture and in many cases a serious business animate being because of its instant information retrieval nature, gum olibanum n earlyish a real time info exchange.When Twitter was launched kickoff, it was criticized by many bloggers as a baseless startup, but Twitter was revolutionary, after launch of Twitter many similar services got launched.While on global scale brands like Twitter (need no intro) and Jaiku are main players along with Pownce (from Digg), India is also deliberately pavement way in Microblogging, though Twitter remain the key player in India too, a lot of Micro blogging platforms were introduced in past hardly a(prenominal) months in India. Below are major microblogging platforms in IndiaA web app from Indian industrious technology company weavearoo, Sms gupshup is major Indian micro blogging platform. It provide users to send/free free text SMS to any windi ng device. Unlike to Twitter, it provides its users to create and join groups to send and recieve SMSs to and from users in these groups respectively.Sending and receiving SMS via mobile and online site system seems to have 15 ratio thus the site doesnt appeal much sleek in User Interface.Vakow-It is the conterminous major micro blogging and SMS based site in India after SMSGupShup, in terms of usage and site traffic. Vakow too provide SMS message from web to mobile devices plus other features such as tagging, to tag the messages and group them based on these tags to send Pictures from web to mobile devices although a light weight, low resolution black white pictures save.Moroever, Vakow has worked out a way, done with(predicate) Twitter API, so that one can send updates from their mobile devices to twitter via Vakow, reason being Vakow cost less twitter, when it comes to sending message from any mobile devices in India to twitter servers.Shockles is one another such service, its a mobile message board, in short functionality are similar to that of Twitter along with features it carry. The application however is several(predicate) in product marketing in way that it provide Enterprise shockles which is a product in the tender packet for business category and as per the website amongst the introductions first on-demand and mobile enterprise solution for business social networking and collaboration.Kwippy is one of the most illustrious nanoblogging service including twitter in india, reason being you can post message from Gmail or GTalk directly to kwippy or integrate Gtalk and Yahoo messenger status, share links. Kwippy is thus a micro/nanoblogging webapp + IM status logger + social network.(A) In kwippy, the unhurt focus is on the Instant Messenger, right now Gmail address book(Gtalk) and Yahoo only. The friends list on the instant messenger is the most intimate friends list you can find, of all social networks as per Kwippy blog. The microblog app without delay is in private beta, but one would get invite in brief in a day or two. Rest is much similar to Twitter such as lingo like followers,following and tweets being Kwips hereScope of microblogging in IndiaMicroblogging is no longer unfamiliar to Indias young netizens . Twitter undoubtedly remains the most popular microblogging service, and theres more to come So why are so many young Indians interested in micro blogging? The answers its easy ant its simple. hardly dig a little deeper and the following reasons the 5 Cs seem to be why microblogging appeals so much to the Indian youth.Communication Microblogging allows you to communicate with thousands of population scattered all over the globe. The youth loves to stay attached and microblogging is barely another way for them to stay in touch (apart from texting, emails, IMs, and social networking sites). Ever since the Bollywood brigade has interpreted to Tweeting, the allure of microblogging has only increased .Connectivity Connectivity without restrictions of time and space is a striking get off that technology has offered the bloggers. You can also use cell phone to connect to the microbloggers tweeting out there, Hence it is practically a mobile and internet jazz band pack So there you are blogging from any corner of the world that too even without a computer, sharing the experiences there and wherefore and staying connected to the blogging universe all the time.Content creation Seeing your own field being read by wide audience is a great feeling which does prompt many bloggers to enter the blogosphere. Though the depicted object many a times remains very basic and does not rattling have much of a literary value, one has to accept the detail that new media such as Twitter allows passel to create their own content and share it proudly with the world.Crisp The lengthy sagas on mend blogs have no place in microblogging universe. Microblogs are supposed to be less than 200 char acters, that is why they are micro. Twitter allows maximum of 140 characters, and this restriction does make the post short and crisp. Any microblogger tries to make the post maximum interesting in minimum amount of ledgers, just what the readers expect it to be. Just like their other choices, the youth likes it short, crisp and to the point. (Even though sometimes the post itself has no point altogether)Cult microblogging has become a cult. Just like Yahoo chat and Orkut were. There might be many of your peers who type away every little thing they do and have 500 followers. And then there is our media who treats this new medium with agree enthusiasm. So you glance through newspapers, or just watch an sport channel and know that Shah Rukh Khan has got tons of followers within few days, and what did Priyanka Chopra write to her tweeple even if you do not know what exactly Twitter is. Of course, the movie stars or politicians many a times do it for their own promotion, but that jus t adds an it factor to microblogs. It makes the youth go after it more. That has unawares become the aspirational and the thing to do you see.Microblogging is redefining what a conversation is all round, blurring the line between SMSing and blogging, and between the private and public. communicateging on the phone has no particular(a) baggage that blogging on a computer carries you dont have to be grammatically correct and your blog post could be just any drift thought.In Mumbai, Twitter inspired a tweetup, when Gaurav Mishra, a marketing professional and an early adopter of technology, wrote out a post saying Blog meets are so pass. I want a Mumbai Twitter meet.Webaroo Inc, which launched the free microblogging service SMSGupShup in India last April, claims to be emergence at nearly 4 per cent every day purely through word-of-mouth publicity. they expect users in excess of 20 million to begin with the end this year.Costs are recovered by placing contextual ads at the end of the SMS. MyToday MOBS, a microblogging service from Netcore Solutions that took off last July, sees nearly 25,000 people publishing on a daily basis again, with zero advertizement and marketing costs.India has the worlds third-largest mobile base. If you create services leveraging the mobile as a platform . Its not even just text any longer phone companies are ringing in an era in which pictures, video and audio can be blogged instantaneously.Nokia Nseries introduced its M-Blog last year. When blogging began in the 90s, the only way to blog was to get to a computer and upload images, text and video. But not any more.Reliance has seen a four-fold increase in its m-blog usage since it started advertising the features.In Japan, five out of ten of last geezerhood best-selling novels were originally written out on cellphones . Microblogging is helping people release a lot of creative energy free of cost. They could be inspired to compile the microblogs as books eventually and this t rend is quickly inherited up in india..Microblogging is definitely here to stay. Blog-camps and virtual get-togethers are already happening with bloggers all across the globe. Microblogging could surely reach lot more number of people. It will originate more with the convergence of technology, and become a regular part of our lives, twain real and virtual.Issues with MicroBloggingThreatWeb surfing is no longer a solo affair.Facebook, Twitter, and other social networks have quickly become an integral part of the online culture, and with them come a whole new array of potential security threats. In this article, well set some of the key dangers ofsocial networking/microbloggingConcerns about Micro bloggingThe main concerns with micro blogging, as with other forms of social media, are concealment, security and integration. In the track to take the first mover advantage(in case of businesses) or just to be among the first to use of these new technologies many users do not conside r the potential risks or the shortcomings of these upcoming technology. Nearly all the micro blogging sites tack information about users and some of them consider the personal information provided on account profiles to be their property. These services are reserved with the right to use personal information and to transfer it to third parties. Which are generally mentioned in terms and conditions. (Did you check the Terms of Agreement before you signed on?).Following are the three main key consequences-Privacy concerns of broadcasting social or work information to everyone who follows your feed earnest concerns of the public perceive possible cutting work informationIntegration how to adapt micro blogging into the corporate culture.Privacyis a major issue, because the users sometimes broadcast sensitive personal information, which can be viewed by anyone who views their public feed. Micro blog platform providers can also cause privacy issues, through ever-changing or presetting users privacy options. An practice session would beGoogles Buzz platform, which incited controversy in 2010 by automatically publicizing users email contacts as followers. Googlelater amend these settings.Security concerns have been voiced within the business world, since there is potential risk of sensitive work information to be published on micro blogging sites such asTwitter.Integration could be the hardest issue to overcome, since it can be argued thatcorporate culturemust change to accommodate micro blogging. It helps to share information with potential clients in the most concise manner. They feel that employees might be distracted which might affect their productivity at work. One more issue is that business is not able to mold upon which website which they should use depending on the popularity in different areasA major issue for an organisation is the concern that employees might broadcast sensitive work information. Micro blog posts (unless sent as private direct messag es) are searchable by other users and websites. An organisation will never want the public comprehend possible sensitive work information on the public micro blogging sites. Just because people are using new means of communication does not mean that an organisation has any obligation or should rattling sanction or implement these upcoming technologies. However, micro blogging has become a popular and useful communication tool, which can be used to benefit some organisations. If an organisation allows the use of various public micro blogging service by employees, then there is a need to implement a policy with clear guidelines on appropriate usage. If, on the other hand, an organisation decides to integrate micro blogging into the corporate culture, they should investigate enterprise solutions and find one that will be easy to integrate with their animate platforms.Define privacyMarrying privacy and social networking/micro blogging may seem unreal to some. How can you be social an d open and yet protect your privacy? Well, just because you are choosing to share some of your personal/private information with a selected group of people does not necessarily mean that you want to share all of your information, or that you want this information to be visible to all.Facebook in particular has suffered from a number of issues related to privacy concerns. If you have used Facebook for a while, you may have noticed ads with your friends names or photos associated with them.Facebook does provide privacy controls for you to customize what types of information should be available to third-party applications. If you look at the Facebook Ads tab of the privacy controls, though, youll notice that it offers no way for you to opt out of the internal Facebook Ads. It merely states that Facebook strives to create relevant and interesting advertisements to you and your friends.Enterprise Microblogging SecuritySecurityThis will probably be of paramount concern at least initially in most businesses. All businesses want to make sure that they keep internal communications safe from intrusive extraneous eyes. An enterprise microblogging solution must provide for fine-grained authorization and authentic security of communications. Management, through the IT department will try and want to restrict who can see certain posts and who cannot.Remember who your friends areWhen you write a Twitter tweet or post a Facebook status update, you have to keep people who will be able to see your post in mind. More and more these days, we hear stories of people who have forget that their boss is part of their network and have said things online that have gotten them reprimanded, evenfired.The consequences of inappropriate online comments have become so common that they have pull in an entry in the Urban DictionaryFacebook fired. Saying something as unmistakable and seemingly innocent as Im tiredor things such asAny better paying short letter?Im available in a status upda te during work hours can have dire consequences if the wrong people see it.Or even posting some jokes about other community or religion can have some serious consequences.MICROBLOG VS EMAILGoogle CEO Eric Schmidt had this to say about the microblogging service TwitterSpeaking as a computer scientist, I view all of these as sort of poor mans email systems. In other words, they have aspects of an email system, but they dont have a generous offering. The question about companies like Twitter is Do they essentially evolve as sort of a note phenomenon, or do they fundamentally evolve to have revocation, identity, storage and all the other aspects that traditional email systems have? Or do mail systems broaden what they do to take on some of that characteristic themselves?At first sight, it seemed like an example of Google not getting it when it comes to Twitter. But actually it is a new way of not only posting notes about what ones doing, but it also has a lot of communications usage v ia replies and direct messages (DMs).Reflecting on Schmidts statement, it can be inferred that microblogging is slowly replacing a lot of email activity.As more companies are taking up microblogging with services like Yammer, Socialcast, Present.ly and SocialText Signals, employee communications amongst employees is both increasing and getting diverted away from email. Something like thisFig 3.4Socialcasts Tim tender had this to say about emaile-mail is dead. If your company is relying on email for communication and collaboration, your company is walking dead in this new economy. beingness the CEO of Socialcast, it is not a very surprising statement.The shift described applies regardless of the microblogging application used.Features present in Social Networking sitesMicroblogging does not change email. But these guys are advancing their product, and are rising up the exertion axis.Here is what Yammer or any other social networking site now offersBehind the firewall installationP ublic notesrepliesDMsGroupsPrivate groupsFile attachmentsFavorites (a form of bookmarking)TaggingConversation threadingUnlimited character length (i.e. not limited to 140 characters)SearchLook at that list. When you think about your own internal email usage, whats missing? Folders or the Gmail equivalent of tags seem to be something for the down the road. Thus, Microblogging still has the insurgent, disruptor profile relative to corporate email.But dont underestimate that. Theres what IT knows is needed behind the scenes. and then theres what the users actually do when given the different applications.Expanding Communications, Marginalizing EmailMicrobloggings premise is that public proclamations of what youre doing and information that you find are a new activity for people, and they have value. Information is shared much more easily and in-the-flow of what were all doing anyway.This use case is what promises to dramatically increase communications among employees. As were seeing w ith Twitters explosive growth, it takes time for people to know why they should microblog. But once they get it, it takes off.So services like Yammer/Twitter etc. have your attention as you post updates and read what others post. In reaction to someone posts, you hit the Reply button. Youre having a conversation that others can see, and join as well if they want. You can decide to have crack conversation with someone in that context.Which starts the marginalization of corporate email. Why? Because a lot of whats going to generate interactions is occurring right on that microblogging app youre looking at. Its the most natural thing to act in-the-flow and use that application in lieu of email. Well-designed microblogging applications are also preferably seductive in terms of ease-of-use.The lucid end use cases of emails areNotificationsExternal communicationsThis isnt something thats imminent. Email is quite entrenched in daily workflow, older generations arent likely to stop usin g it and internal microblogging is still nascent.COMMUNOTE AT COMMUNARDO ENTERPRISE MICROBLOGGING CASE STUDY follow information and case study backgroundCommunardo Software GmbH in Dresden, Germany offers software solutions and consultancy in the context of knowledge management and team collaboration. The company has been growing in robust during recent years .It has got an employee strength of 160+. For the most part the employees work in negeriads.com knowledge-intensive project contexts with one to one communication network. The internal IT environment contains group-supporting applications like an intranet wiki, blogs and project spaces.As Communardo itself is a consultancy mansion in the area of Web 2.0 its employees are affiliated with the early adopters of new web services. Some of the employees tried Twitter and realised its potential to break their collaboration at work and the quality of their input in the office. In 2008 they suggested using Twitter or a Twitter-like t ool for the companys project teams. Until then broad email conversations or the usage of the wikis discussion pages were common and haul to a large number of unmanageable messes of information. The anticipation of the benefits of microblog- ging was that it would reconnect different parts of the company which were separated during its growth and that it would be the best tool for representing the flow of information in the project teams.The initial decision of the top level management was against using a public microblogging service like Twitter for internal use. The reasons for this were the perceived functional deficits (e.g. no rights management, few possibilities for search and filtering) and strategic reasons (data protection, security of investment and reliability). Since there were no solutions for enterprise microblogging available, the only fast and easy way to set up a microblogging-type communication system was the use of the blogging software WordPress enhanced with a special root word called Prologue. This setting was tested in a project team. The come up in general was found very useful in Indonesia Furniture handcraft Wholesale Marketplace, and hence it was adopted company-wide. However, the modified WordPress could not meet functional expectations.Conceptualisation and ImplementationCommunardo formulated the following requisites for its internal microblogging toolTopic-centred content structuring and rights management should be available.Various integration scenarios(LDAP, RSS, portlets, mobile client, XMPP, corporate identity) should be supported.Information management should be possible through tagging and filtering.Security features (like encryption, user management and robust software design) should be included.The first requirement showed a remarkable difference from the example of Twitter. It was argued that the so-called noise postings should be minimised. mental disturbance postings are not relevant for the user but because of the ir quantity underwrite important ones. A topic-centred structuring was also seen as the condition for effective rights management. The arrogance behind this was that each person acts in different roles, such as project manager. So it should be conceivable that project-relevant postings by each person would be accessible only to co- workers involved and are part of the same project. The possibility of establishing rights settings for every single posting, however, was rejected in favour of simplicity. Thus, the solution was the conceptualisation of multiple microblogs where single users could be added and then those users could follow that microblog.The approach was implemented in a non-functional user interface prototype. In this early stage of the project special usability consultants were asked to test the prototype including different versions of tagging. The aim of these tests was to find out if the handling would be intuitive. The findings were used to rework the first concep t.After the conceptualisation phase Communardos top management decided to move on and started the implementation phase. The technological planning took place parallel to the hide design. The project team kept the iterative proceeding and published the resulting tool as quickly as was possible. This is what we are going to describe in the next paragraphs.The resulting software artefactThe resulting software is a browser-based microblogging system which uses Web 2.0- typical technology (i.e. Ajax). Communardo chose the name Communote- a combination of the companys name and the word note.At first look Communote looks similar to Twitter. In fact the key elements are the same like the posting stream is the major part of the system and a panel with filtering and navigation options is situated on the right. A major difference is the drop-down list on the top. This UI element is used to choose the microblog in which to post. The first page shows a combined view of all postings from one use rs microblogs. To post a message the user has to either choose a single microblog using the drop-down list or reply to an existing message.The panel on the right contains a dynamic tag mass and additional filtering possibilities. Filters are available for tags, free search, authors, microblogs and time periods. They could also be