Microblogging is a form of blogging using short posts without titles (known as microposts or status updates). 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 (social network) and Instagram can be viewed as collections of microblogs.
As with traditional blogging, users post about topics ranging from the simple, such as "what I'm doing right now," to the thematic, such as "sports cars." Commercial microblogs also exist to promote websites, services, and products and to promote collaboration within an organization.
Some microblogging services offer privacy settings, which allow users to control who can read their microblogs or alternative ways of publishing entries besides the web-based interface. These may include text messaging, instant messaging, e-mail, digital audio, or digital video.
The first micro-blogs were known as tumblelogs. The term was coined by why the lucky stiff in a blog post on April 12, 2005, while describing Leah Neukirchen's Anarchaia.
Blogging has mutated into simpler forms (specifically, link- and the mob- and AUD- and vid- variant), but I don’t think I’ve seen a blog like Chris Neukirchen’s [sic] Anarchaia, which fudges together a bunch of disparate forms of citation (links, quotes, flickerings) into a very long and narrow and distracted tumblelog.
Jason Kottke described tumblelogs on October 19, 2005:
A tumblelog is a quick and dirty stream of consciousness, a bit like a remaindered links style linklog but with more than just links. They remind me of an older style of blogging, back when people did sites by hand, before Movable Type made post titles all but mandatory, blog entries turned into short magazine articles, and posts belonged to a conversation distributed throughout the entire blogosphere.