Fred Stutzman blogged recently about the move from blogging to the use of “in betweenâ€? software tools for very short postings. I am struck by the extent to which the framing of software tools affects their use. Even when tools have quite similar functionalities they get used differently depending on what they are ‘supposed’ to be for. For example, as Fred noted, people could choose to blog about very micro events but now that twitter has come along they use that instead. Or in my interviews with MySpace users they say that conventional email is ‘looong’ (ie they feel they have to write formally on email) while they can send short messages using MySpace’s internal email system because the norms that have emerged on MySpace are different. Though of course there is nothing in principle to prevent them from simply writing shorter emails - it’s not like there’s a per-message charge (yet!)

Fred seems to suggest that these tools are used differently because of their affordances – particularly that tools like twitter are explicitly directed at friends while blogging is “cast to the etherâ€?. There may be an element of this by more sophisticated users but my research with personal bloggers suggests that many of them feel they are sending messages exclusively to their social network even though what they write may be visible to everyone.

PS apologies to our readers about the recent disappearance of the site - we hope we’ll be back for good now…

David Brake