Key Takeaways
- Microblogging is a casual form of blogging with small, frequent posts and is often done on social media platforms.
- Twitter, Tumblr, Mastodon, and Instagram are popular microblogging platforms, and allow users to share their thoughts and interact with others easily.
There are tons of ways to share your thoughts on the internet these days. Writing long posts on your personal blog is largely a thing of the past, and that’s thanks to something called “microblogging.” You may not know the term, but there’s a good chance you’ve microblogged before. We can prove it.
Microblogging vs. Blogging
While it’s true that the term “microblogging” is not super common, the concept isn’t new. In fact, the term seems to have peaked in usage around 2009. You can think of microblogging as a mix between standard long-form blogs and messaging your friends. There’s a very good chance that you’ve “microblogged” without even realizing it.
The term “microblogging” itself gives away what it is. Essentially, it’s a way of blogging with small, more frequent posts. Typically, blogging involves writing long posts with titles and sections, similar to this very article you’re reading right now. However, you might not always have a lot to say on a topic, which is where microblogging comes in.
Generally speaking, microblogging is a much more casual form of blogging. Writing a few tweets about your thoughts on a football game is microblogging. Posting on Tumblr about the movie you just watched is microblogging. Sharing a gallery of photos on Instagram from your vacation can even be considered microblogging.
Microblogging is Social
Most people don’t think of social media sites as “blogs,” but that’s essentially what they are. We spend much of our time on the main “feed” or “timeline,” but a social media website is mostly a collection of user profile pages, and each page can be considered a microblog.
That’s another one of the key differences between microblogging and blogging—the social aspect. Traditionally, blogging has been done on user-owned websites, where there’s a bit of a barrier between the writer and the reader. Comment sections changed that somewhat, but there’s a reason why people who have traditional blogs often use social media to promote their writing.
Twitter and Tumblr, for example, are two popular microblogging platforms. Every time you tweet something, your followers can immediately see and interact with it. Getting that kind of built-in audience for your posts on a traditional blog is much more difficult.
Popular Microblogging Platforms
So, microblogging is simply writing short posts that are most often shared on social media websites. You’ve probably heard of many of the most popular places people go for microblogging, but let’s highlight a few of them.
Tumblr
Tumblr is perhaps the most obvious microblogging platform on the internet. Some people use it for traditional long-form blogging, but it’s most often used for microblogging. You can write text posts, share images, and “reblog” other people’s content to add your own two cents.
Twitter/X
Twitter popularized the concept of short, text-based posts. For a long time, you couldn’t even write a tweet longer than 140 characters. That limit has since been bumped up to 280 characters, and people often string together multiple tweets to form longer “threads.” However, Twitter has always been about quickly sharing thoughts without all the extra baggage of a traditional blog.
Mastodon
Mastodon has similar features as Twitter but it’s a “decentralized” platform. That means there is no one company running Mastodon as a whole. Instead, there are many different “servers” that make up the “fediverse,” and they can all communicate with each other. You create a profile on a server of your liking, and then you can follow or be followed by anyone who also has a profile on the fediverse.
Some blogs are for photo journaling, and the same can be said for microblogging. Instagram is far and away the most popular platform for sharing photos. Instead of having a blog for sharing your photos, you can simply dump them into Instagram much more easily.
At the end of the day, “microblogging” is just a fancy word for posting stuff online. Social media websites have made that much easier to do than it used to be. Now, everyone can have their own little home on the internet through a profile on any of the various social networks.
