But what about the other Twitter-Like services? I can’t call it twittering when I use identi.ca. And, quite frankly, Twitter wasn’t even the first. Years before Biz Stone even thought about Twitter, Dave Winer himself had a similar feature implemented in his OPML editor. As soon as I want to address the more broad form of communication one performs while using Twitter or similar services, I have to refer to microblogging. People often tend to ignore current Twitter alternatives due to the limited amount of users, but if you look closely, then even Facebook offers microblogging. The features are all there: One can update his status, one can see updates, there’s an API.
So, recounting on this simple observation, it sounds easy: If I talk about my personal car, I talk about my Audi. If I talk about cars in general I use the term, well, ‘car’.

There’s a striking difference though: If you ask any of your friends for the definition of a car, you’ll get a simple answer. Ask them for microblogging, and you’ll earn blank faces. They (verb*)facebook, they (verb*)identica, they(verb*)twitter or they (verb*)friendfeed. But they don’t microblog. And that’s fine. In the short run people can call it as they wish – as long as the bigger perspective can clearly be defined. The fact that like everyone says ‘I googled it’ instead of ‘I searched it on the internet’ doesn’t abolish the semantical linkage between ’search’ and ‘google’. Google is still a search engine, no matter which word people use to define the process. And Twitter is still a microblogging service, no matter which word people use to define their usage of said service.

This doesn’t matter now. But this will matter in 1, 5, 10, or 15 years when there’s an alternative to Twitter or when Facebook grew so big that people use their services to perform similar-to-twitter needs, or when something totally different came up and won us all over. Then I’m not tweeting anymore, but still microblogging.

Which means that one should use the term Microblogging as soon as one wants to talk about anything including Twitter. That’s clearer and more concise.

There is no simple monocausal reason to explain this. It might in parts be the (monetary) appeal of the App Store. Another aspect might be a strong usage of the standard Twitter website as a substitute for unnecessary advanced clients.
I do think though, that the primary reason is a direct hint at the latent needs, people solve via Twitter. Even more, I do think that the current state of Twitter clients offers a glimpse at the future of Twitter (or Microblogging, for that matter):
Twitter is the archetypical mobile application.
Currently, a lot of people still twitter while they’re browsing the web. Publishing liks to interesting pages. I do think though, that there’ll be more and more mobile tweeting. Think about it – as soon as Twitter moves beyond being just a tool to publish links; as soon as you start talking about your life, politics, business or local news; that is: as soon as you start using Twitter as it was intended to be, you’ll most likely need it when you’re not at home. The Mumbai terror attacks offer an insight into such a usage scenario (and I will use this example in more posts to come, as it serves as a very good example to understand the nature of Twitter).

This, of course, doesn’t mean, that there’s no need for a sophisticated desktop client. I’m pretty sure, that The Killer Client is already in the works (presumably for Leopard). The interesting conclusion to draw from the above observation is that, in the future, Twitter might very well become ubiquitous.

(1) Nielsen Media Alert: Fastest Growing Social Networks for September 2008.