A blog is an informational website consisting of discrete, often informal diary-style text entries (posts). Posts are typically displayed in reverse chronological order so that the most recent post appears first, at the top of the web page. Until 2009, blogs were often the work of a single individual, occasionally of a small group, and often covered a single subject or topic. In the 2010s, "multi-author blogs" (MABs) emerged, featuring the writing of multiple authors and sometimes professionally edited. MABs from newspapers, other media outlets, universities, think tanks, advocacy groups, and similar institutions account for an increasing quantity of blog traffic. The rise of Twitter and other "microblogging" systems helps integrate MABs and single-author blogs into the news media. Blog can also be used as a verb, meaning to maintain or add content to a blog.
BitlBee is a cross-platform IRC instant messaging gateway, licensed under the terms of the GNU General Public License.
Jaiku was a social networking, micro-blogging and lifestreaming service comparable to Twitter, founded a month before the latter. Jaiku was founded in February 2006 by Jyri Engeström and Petteri Koponen from Finland and launched in July of that year. It was purchased by Google on October 9, 2007.
HCL Connections is a Web 2.0 enterprise social software application developed originally by IBM and acquired by HCL Technologies in July 2019. Connections is an enterprise-collaboration platform which aims to helps teams work more efficiently. Connections is part of HCL collaboration suite which also includes Notes / Domino, Sametime, Portal and Connections.
Microblogging is a form of blogging using short posts without titles known as microposts. Microblogs "allow users to exchange small elements of content such as short sentences, individual images, or video links", which may be the major reason for their popularity. Some popular social networks such as Twitter, Mastodon, Tumblr, Koo, and Instagram can be viewed as collections of microblogs.
identi.ca was a free and open-source social networking and blogging service based on the pump.io software, using the Activity Streams protocol. Identi.ca stopped accepting new registrations in 2013, but continues to operate alongside several other pump.io-based hosts provided by E14N which continue to accept new registrations.
GNU social was a free and open source software microblogging server written in PHP that implements the OStatus standard for interoperation between installations. While offering functionality similar to Twitter, GNU social seeks to provide the potential for open, inter-service, and distributed communications between microblogging communities. Enterprises and individuals can install and control their own services and data.
Ping.fm was an advertising-supported social networking and micro-blogging web service that enabled users to post to multiple social networks simultaneously.
TwitPic was a website and app that allowed users to post pictures to the Twitter microblogging service, which at the time of TwitPic's creation could not be posted to Twitter directly. TwitPic was often used by citizen journalists to upload and distribute pictures in near real-time as an event was taking place.
Qaiku was a micro-blogging and lifestreaming service comparable to Twitter and Jaiku. It allowed users to post short text or picture messages that other users can then comment. In comparison to Twitter and Jaiku, Qaiku had a multilingual focus, with all messages marked and searchable based on their language. It was shut down on October 15, 2012.
The tables below compare general and technical information for some notable active microblogging services, and also social network services that have status updates.
WebFinger is a protocol specified by the Internet Engineering Task Force IETF in RFC 7033 that allows for discovery of information about people and things identified by a URI. Information about a person might be discovered via an acct: URI, for example, which is a URI that looks like an email address.
Tencent Weibo was a Chinese microblogging (weibo) website launched by Tencent in April 2010, and was shut down on September 28, 2020. Users could broadcast a message including 140 Chinese characters at most through the web, SMS or smartphone.
Reblogging is the mechanism in blogging which allows users to repost the content of another user's post with an indication that the source of the post is another user.
OStatus is an open standard for federated microblogging, allowing users on one website to send and receive status updates with users on another website. The standard describes how a suite of open protocols, including Atom, Activity Streams, WebSub, Salmon, and WebFinger, can be used together, which enables different microblogging server implementations to route status updates between their users back-and-forth, in near real-time.
Evan S. Prodromou is a software developer and open source advocate. He is a co-editor of ActivityPub, the W3C standard for decentralized social networking used by platforms such as Mastodon.
Pump.io was a general-purpose activity streams engine that can be used as a federated social networking protocol which "does most of what people really want from a social network". Started by Evan Prodromou, it is a follow-up to StatusNet; Identi.ca, which was the largest StatusNet service, switched to pump.io in June 2013.
The fediverse is an ensemble of social networks which can communicate with each other, while remaining independent platforms. Users on different social networks and websites can send and receive updates from others across the network.
Micro.blog is a microblogging and social networking service created by Manton Reece. It is the first large multi-user social media service to support the Webmention and Micropub standards published by the World Wide Web Consortium, and is part of the Fediverse, supporting ActivityPub.
ActivityPub is an open, decentralized social networking protocol based on Pump.io's ActivityPump protocol. It provides a client/server API for creating, updating, and deleting content, as well as a federated server-to-server API for delivering notifications and content.
