Call it Twitter

"He calls it Microblogging, I call it "twitter." wrote Dave Winer; and he's quite right. Depending on the perspective, that is. While doing research for my upcoming BA thesis I thought a lot about this subject. Microblogging is a definition for a specific social process: Writing and publishing short bits of information on the web. Twitter, on the other hand, is an implementation of said specific social process. When I perform 'microblogging', I perform it via Twitter. That's an easy distinction.

But what about the other Twitter-Like services? I can't call it twittering when I use identi.ca. And, quite frankly, Twitter wasn't even the first. Years before Biz Stone even thought about Twitter, Dave Winer himself had a similar feature implemented in his OPML editor. As soon as I want to address the more broad form of communication one performs while using Twitter or similar services, I have to refer to microblogging. People often tend to ignore current Twitter alternatives due to the limited amount of users, but if you look closely, then even Facebook offers microblogging. The features are all there: One can update his status, one can see updates, there's an API. So, recounting on this simple observation, it sounds easy: If I talk about my personal car, I talk about my Audi. If I talk about cars in general I use the term, well, 'car'.

There's a striking difference though: If you ask any of your friends for the definition of a car, you'll get a simple answer. Ask them for microblogging, and you'll earn blank faces. They (verb*)facebook, they (verb*)identica, they(verb*)twitter or they (verb*)friendfeed. But they don't microblog. And that's fine. In the short run people can call it as they wish - as long as the bigger perspective can clearly be defined. The fact that like everyone says 'I googled it' instead of 'I searched it on the internet' doesn't abolish the semantical linkage between 'search' and 'google'. Google is still a search engine, no matter which word people use to define the process. And Twitter is still a microblogging service, no matter which word people use to define their usage of said service.

This doesn't matter now. But this will matter in 1, 5, 10, or 15 years when there's an alternative to Twitter or when Facebook grew so big that people use their services to perform similar-to-twitter needs, or when something totally different came up and won us all over. Then I'm not tweeting anymore, but still microblogging.

Which means that one should use the term Microblogging as soon as one wants to talk about anything including Twitter. That's clearer and more concise.