Micro-Blogging: The New Web Phenomenon?

What is happening in the ever-changing world of youth communication? Are ‘traditional’ mediums for online social communication becoming obsolete? Are the younger generations still reading the standard type pad style blogs? Are they media multi-tasking? These are some of the questions that posed themselves as The Lounge looked into the composite world of online communication.

Many young people don’t feel the need, have the time to attempt to read and digest a full blog due, in part to the constant diet of information snippets that they get fed from the established sites such as Facebook, Bebo, Myspace and Twitter as well as less established sites like Plurk, Fanfou, and to some extent Tumblr. The content on these sites goes a long way to satisfying their daily curiosity craving while fitting in with their hectic life-style. The aforementioned sites let users share information through short ‘micro’ posts, whilst eavesdropping on the upcoming activities, opinions, feeling and conversations of their peers through applications such as Facebook’s ‘news feed’. These ongoing streams of status-updates can be logged with ever-increasing ease; via the web, SMS or IM – in short, meaning that you will never be too far from a means through which you can let others know anything at all; how you are feeling, your plans for the evening, or what you ate for breakfast!

On top of this, young people are now getting more and more involved in micro-blogging through visual media sites such as Flickr & DailyMugshot, as well as using video (one to explore for brands that would like to attach a face/personality to their target audience insights). Micro-blogging with video has been coined as ‘live-streaming’ or ‘life-casting’. These terms originally referred to 24/7 streamers such as Justin TV, but now essentially refers to those who use video to stream their life online in any length. This process is becoming easier all the time, thanks mostly to the technological advancement of the mobile phone – meaning that there is now no longer any need to strap a camera to your head! Several popular services make it really simple to life-cast via mobile to the web, these include; Juicecaster, Kyte, Qiklife (launched in 2008 as the world's first life-casting ‘community’) and Next2Friends (where life-casting found it's way into Social Networking at Next2Friends with their introduction of live streamed video from mobile).

So do time-precious young people still engage in media multi-tasking? The answer is yes; all-in-one services are emerging, letting you micro-blog with multimedia, i.e. posting; photos, video, text, music, and other content. Twixtr mashes up Twitter with photos; Twiddeo merges it with video; Seesmic is its own video micro-blogging community; Utterz is an emerging mobile-driven platform that uses voice, video, text and images; Zannel is similar, but has developed a more professional presence using bands and studios. This sort of multimedia micro-blogging will simplify young people’s online lives. They will no longer have any need to visit multiple sites as these services will give them all that they need to stay in the social loop.

These developments could well be the beginnings of the next web phenomenon, one that will flourish in the hands the younger generation of internet user. Just think about what young people do on their phones (texting and taking pictures), then tie this to what they are doing online (social networking) and a marriage of the two makes perfect sense. It will maximize the potential of our new media and technology by using them in ways that are mutually beneficial to each other and most importantly, irresistible to the average young internet user. Pretty soon, everything will be viewable through the handset, bringing about a new unprecedented level of online connectivity among the next generation.

What is clear is that the ongoing evolution of social networking sites, coupled with the emergence of new micro-blogging sites is spawning a new online medium through which brands can attempt to engage and connect with the collective consciousness of a generation, while simultaneously supplying young people’s insatiable need for instant information…. Viva la evolution!