Microblogging is gaining ground, but how well can this medium be used and monetized?

Many of us hate reams and reams of text, we hate long essays...we like it all short and sweet. Maybe that's why there is now interest in microblogging. Let's face it, reading and writing blogs can get a bit tedious, and being able to blog 'on the go' has its own charm.

For those tuning in late, microblogging is blogging in the micro form. You make a point (or not!) in less than 200 characters through your cellphone, email, Web, instant messenger, and so on. So being able to write flawless English (or any other language supported by a microblog service) is not critical at all. Just make your presence felt.

And sure enough, this seems to be catching on. A quick look at Alexa's stats for twitter.com, the leading name in microblogging compared to those of blogger.com, the popular blogging site throws up some food for thought. Blogger scores more on page views and number of people visiting it. But twitter.com is climbing the traffic ranks steadily. In the past three months, it has jumped more than 1,200 places to reach a place within the first 1,000 sites. Blogger is ranked 9, way ahead.

But if you read the signs, things are going to rock for microblogging sites, too. Put 'twitter' in Google search, and you get 27,700,000 results. In fact, Google recently acquired jaiku.com, a microblogging site.

There are other sites too in this category that have avid followers. These include Pownce and Tumblr. In India, there is SMSGupshup and Vakow. Most social networking sites also allow you to microblog in some form or the other. The service is free, for now at least. If you use SMS to update your microblog, then you pay your SMS rate. The service then forwards the SMS to the group you are a part of. People in the group can then respond to it, or leave new messages.

Try visiting some of these sites, and you encounter stuff like requests on radio or the messages column in the newspaper. And just like on the radio or in the newspaper, if the eye-balls increase, ads start coming in, microblogging is counting on the same. The mobile advertising industry, which is expected to touch Rs 500 crore by 2011, by some estimates, will have a good chunk coming from this category.

In India, little known languages, and even mainstream religions, are using this tool to educate and revive old traditions and cultural practices. If done well, many groups can build up and be sustained through micro blogs. Which is when it will turn into a solid advertising medium. For now, though, advertisers can themselves create such bloglets and educate their target audiences in a subtle manner.

But what are the issues related to this? Who controls the content? Right now there is no control, and language you don't want to read/hear can get posted. Would anyone be there to moderate these groups? Just like bloggers are meant to be responsible for the content they put up, microblogging also would need some sort of monitoring. After all, it's the young who will jump into this, and there could be any sort of groups preying for them in any manner.

And what about getting spammed? That's all a very real possibility here. Are there measures in place to protect us from that! Anyone can sign up for any group and get indirect access to the mobile numbers of all people signed up on a site. Then, can devious ways to start spamming be far behind?

As immediacy becomes important in our lives, microblogging does have a potential which blogging might not have had. But as a medium, it is still in its infancy. Will it turn into a lucrative medium? Watch out for some action there.