All about microblogs

Microblogs are nominally condensed blogs where users send brief text updates instead of the usual paragraphs to page-sized updates. One of the first microblogs (also known as tumblelogs) was Anarchaia, whose owner Christian Neukirchen described it as 'more than a linkblog but contains less than a usual blog'. Anarchaia was started in March 2005 and various similar services were rolled out over the same period of time. However, it is only when Twitter broke into the scene in 2006 when microblogs gained the most attention.

Microblogs are heavily influenced by numerous technological developments including obviously blogs, Instant Messaging (IM), Internet Relay Chat (IRC), and in more recent times, the mobile phone.

Blogging (a contraction of the word weblog) started as an activity on the Internet for people to keep personal online diaries or journals. These diaries, basically running commentaries of the writer's daily lives, appeared on the Internet starting from 1994. Jorn...