Microblogging

Overview

Microblogging is a type of blogging distinguished by the brevity of its content, typically associated with blogging platforms specifically designed for such, the best known of which are X (formerly Twitter) and Tumblr, with Facebook's status update essentially serving the same purpose within a richer social media environment. There is no one genre of microblog, which range from the personal and ephemeral to hard news, and there is a minor phenomenon of short stories and novels published as microblogged installments. Though there is no formal threshold separating a microblog from a blog, microblogging usually encompasses posts that are no longer than a few sentences or a single image. Tumblr complicates this; though the platform and its associated apps are optimized for microblogging, it is not difficult to use it for text posts as long as the average blog post, and a number of Tumblr accounts make long posts regularly. By the same token, while X imposes a character limit on single tweets, a common convention is the X thread, in which multiple (often numbered) tweets are made in succession on the same topic. Though not always thought of as a microblogging platform, Instagram, now run by Facebook, is a good example of the form, focused on posts of photos or brief video with short captions. TikTok, which is described as a microvlogging platform, has been embraced by social media influencers, social justice activists, and others.

Many microblogging platforms, especially the best-known ones, are accessible both from the web and from mobile apps, and incorporate features of social media, including the use of friends or followers and the ability to send private messages. Many users of popular microblogging platforms likely do not identify as microbloggers in the same way that authors of traditional blogs identify as bloggers; they treat X, Tumblr, and Instagram as extensions or elements of their social media presence.

X and Tumblr are similar in their functions. On each platform, posts are publicly accessible by default, but users can elect to make them private, meaning they are seen only by the users the poster has added as friends (on Tumblr) or who follow the poster (on X). Posts can be liked, commented on, or replied to, or reblogged ("retweeted" on X), meaning that the post is reposted to the user's own feed, retaining the attribution of the original author (Yukari & Lewis, 2018). Instagram lacks reblogging as a native feature, but many third-party programs enable it. Facebook is a more complex environment, but users similarly have control over who sees their posts, and can reblog other users' posts ("sharing"). Most of these services also allow the use of "hashtags," that is, topic indicators prefaced by the hash or pound sign (#), a practice inspired by a similar use of the hash sign on the Internet chat protocol IRC. There are a number of smaller microblogging services, including Diaspora, Yammer, Mastodon, and Gab.

Among social media sites, Facebook was the industry leader as of January 2024 with more than 3 billion monthly users. Instagram had 2 billion monthly users while TikTok—a short-form video platform quickly gaining in popularity in the early 2020s—had 1.5 billion monthly users. X reported 619 million monthly users.

Further Insights

Twitter (now X) was founded in 2006, with Tumblr following in 2007. Though microblogging had preceded them, they were the first well-known platforms devoted to it, and popularized the term. Twitter was instrumental in ushering a new age of Internet usage primarily centered on smartphones rather than traditional computing devices; when the first iPhone was released in 2007, Twitter was clearly optimized for it. Twitter pages are bare-bones, owing more to the Facebook news feed than to traditional blogging platforms. The user can view either his own profile, listing his tweets in reverse-chronological order, or his timeline, listing the tweets of all the accounts he follows. Initially every entry (or tweet) was limited to 140 characters; in late 2017 this was doubled to 280—still shorter than the average paragraph. The character limit was originally chosen because Twitter can be used through SMS short codes, though this is no longer a common means. It soon became one of the ten most visited Internet sites—from 2007 to 2008 it grew from 400,000 tweets per quarter to 100 million—and one of the most popular smartphone apps. By the 2020s, that figure had grown to about 500 million tweets per day and 200 billion per year. The platform repeatedly demonstrated its relevance as a source of news. Twitter has long been thought of as the social app for users previously uninterested in or unfamiliar with blogging or social media, in much the same way that Facebook brought many people online who had previously limited their Internet usage to a little bit of shopping and web browsing.

Because of its brevity and the nature of the timeline, Twitter/X encourages real-time usage: unlike traditional blogs, in which readers might be expected to keep up with every entry, a common way to use X is to open the app and see what is happening "now." One of the effects of this is that with a sufficiently large and diverse timeline, a user of X has access to running commentary on the day's public events, from hard news to sports and entertainment. It is common for West Coast X users to have to avoid the platform on nights when their favorite television shows air, for instance, because East Coast users, watching three hours earlier, may spoil them by posting responses that reveal critical plot developments. Similar problems are faced by fans of major movies—especially movies in existing franchises like Star Wars—who choose not to see the movie on opening day. Spikes in X usage are associated with major events, both foreseen (elections, sports championships, movie releases) and unforeseen (Twitter servers crashed after the death of Michael Jackson in 2009, when more than 100,000 tweets on the singer were made per hour).

Users discovered an initially unforeseen purpose for X as a way to interact with celebrities, entertainers, scientists, and politicians. Most politicians are expected as a matter of course to maintain X accounts, though they may in practice be operated by social media interns, as is the case with the accounts run by major corporate brands. Since 2009, tweets have even been sent by astronauts while in space. Actors, musicians, models, directors, screenwriters, and other entertainment industry figures frequently use it to interact with fans, with some becoming as significant a figure on X as they are in their own industry—comedian Patton Oswalt, model-cookbook author Chrissy Teigen, and actor-activist Rose McGowan are notable examples.

Tumblr was founded in 2007, and is named for "tumblelog," a lesser-used term for microblogs. It is accessible either from the web or via an app. It differs principally in its types of posts, which are usually longer than X's but shorter than a traditional blog's, and its incorporation since 2015 of an instant messaging feature. Tumblr posts are categorized by type, which the user must select when beginning a post: text, photo, quote (which is formatted differently from text posts), link, chat, audio, or video. There is no character limit on posts as there is on X; Tumblr is a microblog by convention and optimization rather than through force. By February 2021, Tumblr users had posted more than 518 million blogs on the site.

Issues

Microblogging content varies considerably. A 2009 study (Wylie, 2010) of English-language American tweets found that almost 40 percent were conversation among users, another 40 percent "pointless babble," and the remainder a combination of spam, news, and promotion. The study was challenged by social media researchers, who pointed out that Pear Analytics, the market research firm responsible, did not evince much social media literacy in its reading of the data. "Pointless babble," for example, often consists of content that has a greater social intent and reception than Pear credited it with.

Though there has yet to be a breakthrough microblogged novel that has achieved mainstream popularity, the form continues to attract attention. Microblogged novels are published in installments on some platforms, small chunks at a time. In 2014, Twitter held a Fiction Festival to promote microblogged fiction, much of which was written in the form of fictional tweets that revealed the events of the novel through various characters' perspectives.

X's importance not only to the Internet but also to the world at large rivals that of any other Internet service. While other social media services have enjoyed great popularity, no one speaks of "Facebook diplomacy" or "Myspace diplomacy" the way they speak of Twitter diplomacy, that is, the use of the platform by world leaders and diplomats to engage with the public of foreign countries. Michael A. McFaul, a former American ambassador to Russia, has been especially influential in encouraging this use of X; about thirty heads of state run their own X accounts, and many more have official accounts operated by a social media team. Donald Trump was the first American president to set policy via tweet.

During the Arab Spring from 2010 to 2012, Twitter and other microblogging platforms played a critical role in facilitating communication and networking among political protesters, and an alternate stream of information to the traditional media. The specifics of this role varied by country; the Arab Spring was a complex multinational event, and Internet penetration varied from country to country, as did the issues faced by the citizenries. Every history of the period has agreed that the growth of social media and Internet traffic in the region was a key factor leading up to the uprisings, as well as about the importance of Twitter in the political organization of Egypt, Tunisia, and other countries. Twitter saw similar use during the 2009 student protests in Austria, the Occupy Wall Street movement in the United States (beginning in 2011), the 2011 anti-austerity movement in Spain, and the 2013 protests in Brazil. In the early days of the #MeToo movement as revived by Alyssa Milano in the wake of revelations about patterns of sexual abuse by studio head Harvey Weinstein, Twitter was one of the dominant platforms women used to engage with the public about their experiences.

TikTok has proven to be useful for people and organizations seeking to create dialogue or meaningful engagement with users. Because its user population is primarily younger than 30, it has spawned a large community of social media influencers marketing products and services.

The popularity of microblogging has led to high valuations of the associated companies. After Twitter's Initial Public Offering on November 6, 2013, shares of the company closed at $44.90, or a valuation of about $31 billion. Tumblr was acquired by Yahoo for $1.1 billion in cash in 2013, but was unable to meet sales goals, leading to a $712 million write-down three years later. When Verizon acquired Yahoo, its Oath subsidiary took control of Tumblr. In 2018, Tumblr made the decision to ban adult content on its site, leading to a sharp decline in user numbers and visitors. A year later, the platform was sold to Automattic, the parent company of the content-management system WordPress, for $3 million.

As with many elements of the Internet, the pertinent question when it comes to these high valuations is how the companies monetize their popularity. X, Tumblr, Facebook, and Instagram are all free services. Initially high valuations are always based less on a proven track record of profitability and more on the expectation that popularity and high usage can be turned into profits somehow. Advertising, as with most of the Internet, is the main source of revenue, accounting for nearly all of X's revenue. X's change to allow photos and video previews to appear embedded in tweets without users needing to click a link assisted in advertising efforts. Advertisers—or any other user—can pay for three forms of advertising: "promoting" a tweet, an account, or a trending topic. Promoted content appears in search results or users' timelines.

The second revenue stream for X is the "firehose"—the stream of public data that it makes available to data analytics companies to analyze consumer trends. Although all of the data in the firehose is also available to the public, analytics software allows it to be sifted in ways that surface the trends and other information that is sought.

Tumblr instituted a promoted post program in 2013, and primarily raises revenue through advertising, which appear by default on all Tumblr accounts. A smaller revenue stream is generated by selling "themes" to users—the option to change the appearance of their blog.

Bibliography

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