Microblogging is a technology deriving from the public internet. It’s most famous example is the free service Twitter, which has defined the understanding of microblogging. This section starts with briefly introducing the concepts of Twitter-like services. Further, it discusses the applicability of microblogging in project scenarios before it finally gives an overview on available software solutions and selection criteria.
Basics of Microblogging
Microblogging can be seen as paradigm shift in communication principles (Barnes et al., 2010). Members have their own public microblog where they post short updates without having to address them to a special addressee. Other users can be ‘followed’ by adding them to one’s personal network. An aggregated view of all updates by followed microblogs appears in chronological order on the user’s start page. In order to enable easy information publishing, microblogging services often support a wide range of contribution possibilities. For example, messages to Twitter can be posted via mobile text messages, desktop clients or several third-party applications (Java et al., 2007).
Parallel to the adoption beyond internet users, Twitter and microblogging in general became a subject of research. Due to its unique approach, researchers from different disciplines are interested in the topic. Two general kinds of research works can be identified in the existing body of knowledge: A first group contains research which explains the approach using statistical description (Java et al., 2007, Krishnamurthy et al., 2008, Huberman et al., 2009, Zhao & Rosson 2009) or in building theory for predicting user behaviour (Barnes & Böhringer 2009, Günther et al., 2009). The second class deals with microblogging in special use cases and is mostly design science or case study oriented as these works go beyond Twitter and develop further approaches for supporting, e.g., enterprise information management (Böhringer & Richter 2009, Barnes et al., 2010) and e-learning (Ebner & Schiefner, 2008, Skiba, 2008) with microblogging applications or research technological foundations (Passant et al., 2008, Sandler & Wallach, 2009, Assogba & Donath, 2009).