The Mainstreaming of Micro-Blogging

A few weeks ago, there was a lot of talk in the tech blogosphere about when, if ever, Twitter will become mainstream. I added my two-cents worth to the conversation by saying there needs to be more purpose around the service before it goes mainstream (assuming they will fix their stability problems). As I think about this more, I believe the significant trend has less to do about Twitter and more to do about micro-blogging emerging as a mainstream concept.

The reasons I believe micro-blogging will become mainstream are similar to the reasons Twitter has become popular:

• It is easy for people to think and type/text in bite-sized (or in the case of Twitter, 140-character sized) chunks.
• The adoption of smartphones -- and the iPhone in particular -- has brought text-messaging to a new group of users (beyond the Gen Y'ers who grew up with text-messaging as a primary means of communications).

Twitter is not the only service out there that supports micro-blogging; most notably, Facebook and MySpace also do so with their status updates. I think we are just at the tip of the iceberg and I expect we will see many more services ride the micro-blogging trend in the future.