Beyond Blogging
By Pankaj Maru
Mumbai, Apr 21, 2008

In the past few decades, Internet has emerged as the most powerful medium, both in terms of technology as well as socially. The technology community has exploited the power of the Internet to bring out some unique web technologies, which have changed the nature of business and social communication.

The social networking aspect of Internet has played a key role in expanding its usage, reliance and popularity among the masses. Today, Internet offers the fastest and easiest mode of communication, whether it is emails, online chats, scrap messages on social networking portals or the latest trend of blogs and twitter.

For the proactive net user, blogs remain an open space for sharing and expressing opinions, thoughts, ideas, likes and dislikes, and other issues in real time, across physical boundaries.

Though, blogs are tagged with 'freedom of expression' they demand a fair amount of efforts in creating, writing down ideas, concepts, thoughts and views, which need to be transformed into blog contents.

Considering that blogs need time and effort, an alternative new application - twitter is making an early mark on the web world. Twitter is supposed to be simpler, less time consuming and less laborious compared to blogging.

According to Chennai based - Kiruba Shankar, CEO of Business Blogging and founder director of F5ive Technologies, "Twitters are micro blogs or applications - that allow only text messages in 1 or 2 sentences, precisely in 140 characters. But there's no limit to the number of such messages." Shankar has a twitter account, through which he communicates with others.

"The beauty of twitter is its simplicity. Here one just needs to write a single line message, rather than drafting long paragraphs as done in blogs. It allows you to deliver short messages, and hence one has to write concise and to the point," Shankar informs.

Further, "twitter offers more flexibility in communicating as one can update their twitter posts by a mobile sms, instant messengers, blogs and websites. In instant messenger, the message reaches out to a particular person, but twitter messages are from one - to- many," he adds.

With twitter, a person sends text messages to others using a computer or a mobile phone. And to receive the posted messages by others, the user has to select either the mobile or the instant messenger, where the text message can be read either in the sms form on a cell phone or on the instant messenger.

Moreover, search engines such as Yahoo, Google, NewsGatar and several others offer news subscriptions to readers on various topics via twitter messages.

Obvious - a California based software firm, formerly called Odec developed the twitter application in 2006. A similar application termed Dodgeball was co-developed by Dennis Crowley and later on acquired by Google in 2005. However, Dodgeball is offered only in the US, while twitter can be used from anywhere in the world.

So far as it's utility is concerned, founder of Blogworks, Rajesh Lalwani, says about twitter, "It keeps a community linked or connected closely, and multiple people can communicate with others through low cost sms. And twitter has a multiple interface that offers a multi point delivery system."

Lalwani's firm provides strategic social media solutions for corporate blogging.

"Large corporates and enterprises can use it for communicating with its employees within an organization in a secure way. It offers a new means of promoting products and services, in the form of micro ads to customers," he adds.

Lalwani compares twitter's feature of multiple point communication with a virus. "It's like a virus that spreads rapidly among the masses. Presently, it's a free service but in the future users may be charged," he concludes.


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