Blogs have become cemented in the World Wide Web as we know it, but are we about to see the end of them with micro blogging sites such as Twitter and Friendfeed aiming to change the way we express ourselves?
Since the first blogs began spreading back in 1999, companies, employees and individuals have all slowly but surely over time migrated to using blogging platforms as a way to express themselves and get information out there quickly. But this new idea of real-time status updates on sites such as Twitter provides a credible threat to the blogging industry because although users are limited to 140 characters or less, the power of being able to instantly get information out to millions of users in seconds is something blogs just simply can’t do.
Sites such as Twitter and Friendfeed are perfect examples of reasons why bloggers will have to change the way they operate and why we could be about to witness a demise in the growth of blogs. Many users simply don’t have the time or the want to operate their own full time blogs, and for the majority of us we can express what we want to in 140 characters. If we can’t that’s when we will possibly link to a blog, or use emails to communicate the information to those around us.
The exponential growth of Twitter over the past 12 months signifies just how bigger role this new form of communication is becoming. Yes, surveys have found that many users visit once and are then never to be seen again, but that’s the internet for you anyway isn’t it? You do a Google search, find the information you need, and possibly never visit the site again. Twitter will eventually find a way to keep users on the site longer and that’s when we will really begin to see the demise of blogging as we know it.
So what is the key factor behind all this negative talk on blogs? Real-time streams. It seems that we now think of a real time stream as being updates on Twitter, Facebook and FriendFeed, and search engines are scrambling to get real-time results, with partnerships between Google and Twitter probably not far off according to recent speculation, and Microsoft now even showing select Tweets in Bing’s results.
Blogs will still play a key role in getting full and detailed information out to the public long into the next era, but we are likely to see sites such as Twitter really exert their dominance over the coming years as more and more of us lean towards using them instead of a traditional blog to update our friends and family.
July 27th, 2009 at 8:58 pm
brentOn:
This a most insight article. Twitter is certainly one of the next big things. It’s big now and will get bigger. It will get bigger because there are millions of people who just want to “touch base”. The beauty of the Internet is there’s plenty of room for Twitter as wel as regular blogs. As you yourself point out, “Blogs will still play a key role in getting full and detailed information” out.
I say, Let the good times roll!
You may be interested in this article I published 27 July: My Personal Blog Sent Hundreds of Hits to my Triond Content in June http://www.writinghood.com/online-writing/my-personal-blog-sent-hundreds-of-hits-to-my-triond-content-in-june/