Twitter Hype or the Birth of Social Life-Logging

You can't have avoided the incredible growth of Twitter (~3M unique visitors by the end of 2008), the buzz it has triggered, and all the ecosystem of startups wanting to reinvent everything on twitter, "twitterizing the world".

Twitter allows you to answer the question "What are you doing?", continuously through short messages (less than 140 chars), and broadcast them to people that care about you (or about what you're talking of). Of course a micro-blog is also a general blog, but so short you only send links or pictures when you're not describing your amazing personal actions.

Micro-blogging follows the typical hype curve, where people think it can do everything, then are disappointed and think it can't do anything, to finish by framing the service at its right place.
We're just currently at the "peak of inflated expectations", as Twitter started in 2006.

So what is micro-blogging's right place?

I tried micro-blogging, I saw my friends try micro-blogging (twitter, friendfeed, etc.).
At first sight, I could not see any steady long-term interest: as soon as you're using Facebook / Plaxo pulse / Linked-in / Viadeo, they all feature the "status update" that provides the core functionalities of Twitter. All your friends and business contacts are in, why use another service?

We have to acknowledge the strength of micro-blogging: Twitter survived critical failures in platform availability, and despite its scaling problem, more users registered and more services built on twitter have appeared. Its viral characteristics are not enough to explain this steady growth.

Let's do a flashback and compare it to ICQ: this tool opened the way to a new kind of "micro-communication", that was classified as Instant Messaging.
Chats, IM & SMS are a way to micro-communicate with your social network, non invasive, efficient, complementary to phone and email.

Does micro-blogging belongs to this "micro-communication" trend, with a simple public archiving addition? According to me, it is much deeper than this, but we only see the beginning now.


Futuroptions prospective: micro-blogging will evolve into generalized social life-logging. (please comment on this!)


Life-logging is the area of recording your life and transferring automatically your lived experiences to other people. See here more detailed definition & explanations.

We will love life-logging, because it will tell us where we were 3 years ago, which city we visited during this trip, who we met at this party, what we heard in that conference, etc, without planning it or organizing it.
It will allow us to track back our past, live our experiences again much better than today's recording such as photos or videos. And it will empower us with the ability to transmit our experiences to other people.

What we can observe is that micro-blogging is a declared and active way of doing life-logging to your social network (or more broadly).

We can however expect in the future that we'll have all kind of devices and software that will auto-generate the micro-blogging feeds cleverly.
Typically, on us, our mobile phone will record our position, who we are meeting with, take pictures, videos, sound capture, emotional capture, etc. of our environment to be able to recreate this experience to others. The software will rearrange, filter, connect all this information to our social network according to our preferences. It will surely go much further than that.
On top of that, we'll add a few "human expressions", radically different of today's micro-blogging content, but clearly inspired by the services being developed today.

All this remains to be invented and adapted to people willingness...
Which options are you going to follow?