Twitter is a popular platform for micro-blogging. Messages exchanged here are more of status updates or related to users’ activities rather then anything else. So, Twitter is acting as a platform for friends to stay in touch with each other while presenting the posts in a single place. This can be termed as content creation - that is, content that is created by users to share. Similar content can be said to be generated by users in social networking sites like Facebook since information like feeds and profile information is looked at with interest by friends, etc. This would be different from, for instance, publishing on blogs where people generate and keep content and many earn recognition or money from it. Published content is often intended to be read by third parties while content created in social networks like user profiles, feeds, and status messages are meant to be for the interest of friends or any other person interacting on a personal level.

What Twitter has done is diffused the boundary between social interaction and published material leading to the term micro-blogging. One essential feature that is present in blogs and not in content in social networking/interaction sites is user’s advertisments. While advertising on blogs is a widespread and prominent feature and, with social networks becoming more engaging with feeds and applications as on Facebook, advertisments have emerged there too. MicroSocialAds is a service which enables users to embed advertisments in their Facebook profile or into IM conversations they are having with friends.

I see some basic problems with this kind of advertising model. Firstly, a friend won’t want or like to see advertisements while chatting with another friend. People are already used to chatting on good IMs and for one of the chatters, advertisements are a disruption and nothing more. Secondly, while social networking or micro-blogging, a user has no intention of being interested in any particular kind of content since they come to a social network with different intentions. So, its hard for advertising to be useful for a user in such a scenario which is not in the case of published blogs (read more if interested on Advertising in Social Networks). That is why I think advertisers should expect very low clicks per impressions in these cases. This point coupled with the fact that advertising would be disruptive in such scenarios, make it hard to believe that Micro Social ads would be too successful. Thus, even though lines between published blogs and social interaction have diffused, I think they will still differ in terms of advertising - mainly because while the former is about content, the latter is about interaction.