What are you doing now ?

Last thursday, I was reading blog of my friend Satya about blogging. He mentioned why people blog with some good point about blogging. Blogging is truly an efficient way to express yourself. It gives you medium to speak out whatever you want and in my opinion, it also provides platform for potential "writers".

Since last couple of days, I have become irregular in following some of my favourite blogs. And more to that, I am not very much regular in my personal blog even. The reason is another medium which is emerging up against the blogging. Well, its not very very popular but its getting popular in a rapid fashion like a swine flu. I am talking about microblogging, thats Twitter.

I started using Twitter couple of weeks ago and found it very interesting. I consider it more as your status update rather than blogging. It also reminds me of Bulletin board where anybody can put the public message which would be available to everybody who is looking (following) that bulletin board. the same features are already there in facebook and orkut yet there is completely different fun in Twitter. Its more fun to get messages (tweets) in Twitter than getting scraps in the Orkut. Once you start using it, you will almost become a fan of it and eventually become addicted to it. Another feature which I like about Twitter is its smooth integration with cell phones. Once you integrate your Twitter account with your cellphone, it become easy to receive the updates and send the updates like SMS. They call it microblogging because you are allowed to type maximum 140 characters. Obviously you can type more than 140 characters but it defeats the purpose of microblogging.

The main difference between Twitter and other social networking is that Twitter is actually meant for real time status updates. If you are stuck up in betweent the traffic, drop a message on Twitter and everybody following you will get the updates. Few days back, an australian opener (i.e. Phillip Hughes) who was axed from second test in ashes against England, confirmed the news in his Twitter account before it was officially announced by the team. Yesterday, Chetan Bhagat reveled information about two main characters of his forthcoming book (which is coming on Diwali) in his Twitter account. So all these also gives you chance to keep in touch with favourite celebrities also (in case their IDs are not fake !!)

Eventually all this is going in the same direction, bridging the gap between Individuals and constantly updating the world about your "status" and thats the tagline of Twitter, "What are you doing now" ?