Why are we so hooked on microblogging?

Elliot Jay Stocks, in his Blessay about Twitter points out five things that Twitter is (to him at least):

1. An ice-breaker
2. A purveyor of ‘ambient intimacy’
3. A broadcasting / marketing tool
4. A fount of knowledge
5. A social network

Read the rest of his post to get the full explanation.

What are the other options?

Twitter is currently suffering serious technical issues, where do we go to get our 140 character slices of life?

In no particular order we have:

• Friendfeed
• Jaiku
• Pownce
• Tumblr
• Hellotxt

There’s also beemood which seems to be the microblogging equivalent of a sleazy singles bar, at least it did when I looked at it.

And for non-english speakers there is

• gozub – Spanish
• Meemi – Italian
• Numpa – Dutch
• FanFou – Chinese
• and the slightly scatological sounding Feecle – Japanese (puts a whole new spin on “What are you doing?”)

Newly born is Plurk who’s main innovation seems to be a timeline view, although in my opinion it runs in the wrong direction, I’d expect to see earlier posts to the left of the later ones.

We can now enjoy the hype around – ZobZee, like “Twitter and FriendFeed, but awesomer”. This hoax site was created by Jim Kukral apparently to fill the time whilst waiting for Twitter to come back online.

It may be a hoax but the beta acceptance email is pretty funny featuring such gems as:

“The tech is so revolutionary that we had to get special government permits to test it. Initial testing was done on a few select, not to be named, a-list tech bloggers. The response? Total and complete mind melding with the most important geeks in the world.”

and of course

“Our team has been quietly working in stealth mode for 6-months building the app that will kill both Twitter and FriendFeed overnight!”

I’m pretty sure that Twitter can’t be killed overnight, Twitter themselves have been trying unsuccessfully for the past couple of weeks.

All of the above plus I’ve not really touched on the fact that we have another form of microblogging with our status updates on Facebook, MySpace, Bebo, LinkedIn, Plaxo etc. We are truly spoilt for choice yet we keep going back to Twitter, the big friendly “What are you doing?” input is like digital heroin and many of us are severely hooked.

Information overload?

Many of the services I’ve mentioned can also aggregate activity feeds from each other and new conversations can begin around something which was originally posted elsewhere (in fact this is FriendFeed’s primary goal). Are we spreading ourselves too thin, with too much information to process? Possibly, in his post; Comment fragmentation isn’t the blogger’s fault, Steven Hodson says:

“In the end though we have absolutely no control over where the conversation; if there even is one, will take place. No matter how we try to engage our readers – new and old – they will talk about our posts where ever they want to.”

Perhaps it’s not important where the conversation is taking place, only that there is a conversation.