Microblogging: Tiny Social Objects

Jaiku’s Jyri Engestrom‘s recent presentation at reboot 9.0 orients successful social networks around ‘social objects’ – such as Flickr’s photos, del.icio.us’ bookmarks and MySpace’s music and five principles for building such services…

• Define your {social} object.
• Define your verbs.
• Make your object sharable.
• Turn invitations into gifts.
• Charge the publishers not the spectators.

All very useful (particularly for our own mee:view and Believr) though I don’t think its fair to write off non-social-object networks. However, the most interesting part of Jyri’s talk speculated on where future disruptive innovations in blogging may come from. Defining disruptions as either simpler, cheaper or more convenient, Jyri believes that blogging will trend from occasional (a post per week, a photo every day) to continuous (hourly micro-posts).

This is clearly the continuous presence paradigm that Jaiku is pursuing and Twitter has dominated. Sadly, though Jaiku’s a much more elegant and refined service, with a ‘social object’ metaphor, it’s actually the people-oriented Twitter that is repidly evolving into a de-facto infrastructure for presence across all contexts.