Last year around this time I wrote a couple of posts around the question of whether 2008 had been the year of micro-messaging. Mainly it was a discussion of whether Twitter (which at that time was only just starting to become the subject of every discussion about social media) deserved the level of attention is was getting:

Twitter didn’t become the most important thing on the Web in 2008, but sometimes it feels like it did. Twitter didn’t overtake Facebook in terms of users (or even come anywhere close), but 70% of current Twitter users joined in 2008. [...] Maybe the real question is whether 2009 will be the Year of Micro-messaging.

Well, both Twitter and Facebook have kept on growing. So too has Tumblr, the light-weight, socially-oriented blogging platform that I wrote about here as part of the 2008 retrospective. And they’re all growing at sort of close to the same rate:

OK, so maybe not that close to the same rate. These type of stats are always somewhat suspect anyway (I’m going with Wikipedia for these, but that doesn’t deal with inconsistent and often opaque methodologies) and the point is just that the rate of growth averages to something in the neighborhood of doubling over the last year. In a bit more rigorous manner, the Pew Internet & American Life Project came up with roughly the same result:

Some 19% of internet users now say they use Twitter or another service to share updates about themselves, or to see updates about others. This represents a significant increase over previous surveys in December 2008 and April 2009, when 11% of internet users said they use a status-update service.

Three groups of internet users are mainly responsible for driving the growth of this activity: social network website users, those who connect to the internet via mobile devices, and younger internet users – those under age 44.

What I have referred to as micro-messaging and micro-blogging is called “status updating” as far as Pew is concerned. The survey this data comes from only mentions Twitter by name. The question asked was: “Do you ever use the Internet to…use Twitter or another service to share updates about yourself or to see updates about others?” But sharing updates about oneself and seeing ones from others has increasingly taken center stage on Facebook too. Wikipedia even includes Facebook in its comparison of micro-blogging services.

So regardless of the language one uses or the angle one comes at the question from, it looks like over the course of 2009 the popularity “status updating” has doubled from something a tenth of the Internet using population does to something a fifth of it does.

Does this mean that 2009 was in fact The Year of Micro-messaging? Well, I suppose that depends in part on how 2010 turns out. Especially because the coming year might see the other half of the picture come into focus: what all this means for regular old macro-blogs.

That might be a confusing and overly narrow way to put it. Instead let’s make a category for more serious (for lack of a better word) content production: “digital publishing”. So on the one hand there is status updating (an increasingly popular, real time–oriented form of online social communication and content creation/sharing) and on the other there is digital publishing (producing larger units of content like long blog posts or things resembling articles that appear in print).

The difference between these two can get fuzzy. What separates a personal blog that’s serious enough to be digital publishing from a fairly elaborate Tumblr? Well, even though Tumblr does publish directly to the Web, it is still organized around a defined community (users follow each other in a manner similar to Twitter). Moreover, Tumblr recently announced that their API (the service’s interface to third-party applications) is going to start supporting interaction with tools originally designed to work with Twitter. In explaining how this will work, their announcement highlights the similarities between these services:

The really cool thing – because our following models follow a lot of the same principles, we’ve been able to take advantage of a ton of native features:

• Retweeting = Reblogging
• Replying = Reblogging w/ commentary
• Favoriting = Liking
• “@david” = ”http://david.tumblr.com/”
• Conversations = Reblogs

A lot of the client applications this will enable are for mobile devices. That’s significant too: status updating can be done from your phone. These are usually short messages and a typo every so often isn’t the end of the world. Digital publishing is much more of a sit-down-at-a-desk sort of affair. And this is even somewhat supported (or more accurately suggested) by the data from Pew indicating that individuals who connect to the Internet from their mobile device is a key group responsible for driving this year’s increase in status updating.

Meanwhile, digital publishing continues to define itself. In the past few months especially there has been a lot of buzz about magazines and newspapers potentially shifting to tablet computer devices (Mag+, Sports Illustrated, the elusive and magical Apple tablet, among others). Online-only outlets like the Huffington Post and the Daily Beast become more established each day. Most interesting of all might be a “post” from Smashing Magazine, the online Web design publication, about “the death of the boring blog post“. It’s a call for Web sites to start laying out individual pieces separately with their own content-appropriate graphics—to make what they call “blogazines.”

There is, as always, a lot more to this. Where do comments fit it? A lot of status updating is about responding to, discussing, or sharing digitally published material. A lot of people who write that material are avid status update types and even use such services to find things to cover. And there’s a lot more to say as well about the similarities, differences, and data-exchange possibilities of Tumblr, Twiiter, Facebook, and all the other services that might fit into the micro-something category.

Nevertheless, I think it is possible to see the beginning of a convergence of social technologies around certain styles of often informal communication. At the same time, more formal content creation and distribution on digital platforms has become an urgent matter for publishers and an active area of innovation. How money will be made is a whole other can of worms, but significantly it’s not an issue for status updaters. For the platforms that are used for status updating monetization is certainly still an important matter, but not for the people creating and communicating. That’s a very different dynamic. Ads and premium services might play a role in both arenas, but in quite different ways.

So 2010 (like 2009 and 2008) will probably be a Year of Micro-messaging. Will it also be a year of tablets and blogazines?