The Social Media Bible: Tactics, Tools, and Strategies for Business Success, 3rd Edition

Back to the Beginning

Microblogging began with the advent of the blog. After some time spent writing lengthy, detailed accounts, people began to post more condensed, convenient, portable, personal versions of their conventional blog posts into something that was termed a microblog. Microblogging was immediately hailed as conventional blogging’s easier, faster, and more immediately accessible cousin. One of the very first providers of the microblog was Twitter, essentially providing technology that offered a simplified blogging service. Twitter was born in March 2006 as the result of an R&D project at the San Francisco–based start-up company Obvious. It was initially used by the company’s own employees to communicate internally, and launched to the public seven months later on. On March 19, 2007, Twitter’s official debut took place at the annual South by Southwest (SXSW) meeting in Austin, Texas. Twitter is a microblogging and social networking service that allows its users to send and receive brief (140 characters or fewer) text-based, micropost instant messages that are referred to as tweets. These text messages are displayed on the user’s technology of choice—be it a text-messaging cell phone, website, PDA, Twitter website, RSS (see Chapter 17, RSS—Really Simple Syndication Made Simple), SMS,2 e-mail, or an application such as Facebook, Hootsuite, Tweetdeck, or a web page aggregator. These messages are also delivered to anyone who has signed up and been accepted to follow your ...