Why microblogging could be the next email

Twitter is by far the most popular microblogging tool on the internet. Its recent success warranted a $500 million offer from social networking giant, Facebook, but was declined. However, Twitter is not the only tool available to users who want use a microblog to let their followers know what they are doing at any given point in time. Tumblr and Soup have taken the concept one step further to allow multimedia content, Yammer provides a service specifically for internal use within organizations and Quirk provides a time line based feed.
With more and more people spending time on the internet keeping their friends and family up to date on their happenings, updating their social networking profiles, blogging and reading other news, writing long descriptive emails has become a burden on their time.

Microblogging on the other hand provides a viable corporate solution to communication, encouraging transparency and collaboration. The fact that microblogging allows an efficient way to stay in touch with co-workers or customers is highly valued. It also means that the ‘customer centric’ organization can learn more by interacting better with their customers. Microblogging also provides more access than email does. Many mobile devices support applications for services such as Twitter and users can publish their tweets from anywhere and read other’s tweets from anywhere too.

Although microblogging still seems like a novelty, like email it is destined to become central part of our working lives.