Lecture 11 – The Semantic Web

What is the Semantic Web?

The semantic web is the evolution of the Internet to enable data to be shared with inferred meaning (as information), enabling it to be understood by machines.  This requires inference of context via links which return schema-like information about entities, without a miss-match of standards, vocabulary, or language.

RDF (Resource Description Framework)

Makes statements about web resources in the form of (triples) “subject-predicate-object” expressions.

FoaF (Friend of a Friend)

Machine readable ontology describing people, their activities, and the relationships which link them to other people and objects. Vocabulary expressed using RDF and OWL (Web Ontology Language).
Semaintic web isn’t meaning analysed post-publication by AI technology, such as scraping and parsing, but incorporated at creation by client semantic embedding.

Linked-Data / Linked Open Data (LOD)

Representation = contents of a message which carries the essential characteristics of a resource.
Reference = URI to a resource.
Dereference = retrieve value/resource of reference.
Non-information resources are those whose representation is not a document intended for rendering by a browser.

LOD uses dereferenceable URIs to return a representation of a non-information resource for conveying meaning and context to the entity.

More info available at http://www.w3.org/2001/tag/doc/httpRange-14/2007-05-31/HttpRange-14.html.

Federated search

Aggregated results from many indexes of resources (databases etc.), with no search engine having knowledge of all resources which exist or having crawled them.

Developments

Much research into the semantic web isn’t on linked data, but rather how to merge data sets which have different semantic representations, such as creating global naming schemes (like FoaF), so that “clerk” can be recognised as having the same meaning as “receptionist” in another system (requiring information about the term similar to a schema), or “employee” and “contractor”.

Lecture 10.5 – Getting Real (by 37signals)

Getting Real – A guide to building a successful web application

•    Focused on small development (team and output)
•    Agile development

Five selected most insightful things from the book:

•    Prioritise on the big picture, ignore details initially, and focus on only what is required.
•    Build half a product, not a half-ass product – build a solid foundation on only the most essential features, ignore the rest.
•    Hire fewer people who are quick learning generalists, not someone who cannot communicate or change roles.
•    Design the interface first – this can be created and altered the quickest and with the least expense.
•    Design for three states: regular, blank (no data yet/new user), and error.
•    Context is more important than consistency – having a standard method of displaying something is not as important as having it be more appropriate for each instance.
•    Zero training approach – embed help instead of requiring a manual, after all its a web application and can be dynamic.

Lecture 10 – Development Processes

Methodologies

There are many different methodologies designed to optimise the software development process, with differing levels of popularity, due to reduced applicability over time, changing environments, different requirements, and specialisation in certain fields (such as web design over client-side apps).  It is important that selection of a methodology should be based on the specific requirements of the project.  Decision making for whether a solution should be off-the-shelf or custom, and open-source or closed-source needs to be made before committing to a specific methodology, as most don’t incorporate that holistic level of change.

Agile Development

“- Individuals and interactions
— Over processes and tools
- Working software
— Over comprehensive documentation
- Customer collaboration
— Over contract negotiation
- Responding to change
— Over following a plan
- Keyword is “Developer”
- No analyst / programmer distinction
- Distinction is caused by the waterfall model
- Distinction causes need for documents which have no long-term value and limit change
- Distinction not viable in the long-term – analysts get out of touch with rapidly-changing technology”

(Chris Wallace, 2009)

Scrum is often defined (from different perspectives) as both a project management method often used in conjunction with, and a sub-type of, the Agile development methodology, to effectively manage the software development life-cycle.  Development is “empirical” and “iterative”; constantly being re-assessed and deadlines adjusted to give real-world figures instead of speculation and predictions.  Work is divided into “sprints“, with a “product backlog” of future sprint segments to be performed, prioritised by the client.  Standing (short 15min) meetings are held daily with the team, asking the following questions:

1. What did you do since the last Scrum?
2. What are you doing until the next Scrum?
3. What prevented you from doing work?

The team and daily scrum are organised by a Scrum Master, and “Burn-down charts” are used to keep track of and report progress on sprints.  Work is amalgamated into releases which then provide a certain degree of functionality which can be demonstrated to the client.  The following image demonstrates a typical Scrum process.

(Darrell Norton, 2005)

Extreme Programming (XP)

XP is another Agile-based development methodology, which strives to take conventional software engineering practices to “extreme” levels, in order to produce a high quality solution which meets the client’s needs.  The method is based around 12 elements:

- Small releases
- The planning game
- Continuous integration
- Test-driven Development
- Sustainable Pace
- Whole team
- Metaphor
- Pair programming
- Design improvement
- Simple Design
- Collective Code Ownership
- Coding standards

Other points to note:

- Feedback is obtained from actual releases, not necessarily prototypes.
- There is continuous integration between components, interfaces, and developers.
- User stories (an informal, readable, use case)
- Collective code ownership concerns making private code created by one developer available to the whole team rather than making everyone review all code.
- Is the customer part of the team or still external with high levels of communications and interaction?

Perceived greatest benefits of XP:

- Test-driven development – create tests which match what is required and only write code to satisfy them.
- Pair programming – aids learning, training, knowledge, speed, moral.
- Good programming grammar and standards in preference to large amounts of commenting.

References

Chris Wallace, 2009.  Agile manifesto – Values.  [Online]
Published by University of the West of England.  Available from:
http://www.cems.uwe.ac.uk/~cjwallac/IAD/2008/Agile.pptx [Accessed 22.04.09]

Darrell Norton, 2005.  Scrum Overview.  [Online]
Published by CodeBetter.com.  Available from:
http://codebetter.com/blogs/darrell.norton/pages/50339.aspx [Accessed 22.04.09]

Lecture 9 – Standards

Evaluation/Review of Interactive SQL Tutor – Navigation and Search

• The navigation for the tutor site is free from link errors; all links point to where they should/indicate.

• No need for search functionality as the nature of the SQL Tutor is such that comprehensive hierarchical navigation is used which indexes each page in a logical order.

• A search could not be performed using an external engine such as Google as this would not allow the SQL Tutor to be kept private, either within the university or by requiring a login, as it wouldn’t be able to be indexed.

• A custom search feature would require an algorithm to be written to execute server-side in order to find pages which matches the search terms entered, which isn’t that helpful in a worksheet based tutorial service, where navigation adequately allows simple access to the very flat hierarchy of pages.

• The navigation itself adequately provides access to its constituent pages, with varying forms of navigation such as hyperlinks in the page body, as well as the navigation bar at the top of (most of) the pages.

• Apart from the fact that the presentation of the navigation bar displays differently and contains faults in certain browsers, the inconsistency between pages is the largest factor preventing coherent navigation from all pages. This can be sub-divided into two areas: lack of navigation bar on Help, Print, Data Model, and Index pages, and that the hyperlinked text options on the bar itself are different on different pages.

• When at the contents page of a worksheet the next and previous buttons are not shown in the menu bar, only start and previous, which causes other links to be moved, requiring the user to look for which link they want as opposed to knowing it will be in the same place. This can be changed to have links which aren’t available show up in a different colour (greyed out) and not perform an action, thus having a static nav bar which is easy to use but retains current functionality.

• In order to enhance the navigation features of the site a more complex CSS, Javascript, or AJAX implementation could be used to provide access to all pages through drop-down menus from the navigation bar. This would provide 1-click access to pages within the site without using a search facility, or over-cluttering the navigation bar.

Web 2.0 Considerations

• Good use of data aggregation in terms of entered SQL queries, allowing for improvements to be made to the tutor based on common mistakes.

• RESTful interface makes it easy to bookmark pages and provides broad entry into the resource.

Lecture 8 – Web Development Design

Management Process for Web Development

1. Are there available qualified staff in-house to work on project?
2. Training for in-house staff if required
3. Review skills of staff or contracted developer (if not at required competancy level then continue training, select different employee, or choose another contractor)
4. Check progress throughout development
5. Test solution
6. Quality review / sign off work on project

Lecture 7 – Registration Processes

Google App Engine Registration Process

Google Accounts:

1.    Click account creation button
2.    Redirect to central accounts registration (17.32kB)
3.    Enter email address and other registration information
4.    Validate password strength on keypress (client-side)
5.    Validate form details, Captcha image verification (server-side)
6.    Confirm initial registration and send confirmation email
7.    Confirmation email delay in reaching inbox
8.    Sign in to Google account
9.    If unable to sign in then reset password by entering email address entered during registration.

Google App Engine:

10.    Provide educative resources for users/developers before using service
11.    Enter mobile phone country and phone number; send text message with verification code
12.    Enter verification code or resend SMS (disclosure of personal information)

Lecture 6 (Week 7) – Interfaces

Key Bindings

Key bindings are the assignation of commands to certain keys, key combinations, and/or key sequences, where a single or combination of keys when pressed invoke a pre-defined action in the software application or operating system. Often referred to as shortcuts, key bindings alow operations which are performed frequently, or would otherwise require extensive user input, to be performed quickly and easily.

Common Key Bindings (Windows) – Ctrl + C (Copy), Ctrl + X (Cut), Ctrl + V (Paste), Ctrl + A (Select All), Ctrl + P (Print), Ctrl + F (Find), Ctrl + Z (Undo), Ctrl + Y (Redo), Alt + F4 (Close Current Window), F5 (Refresh), Ctrl + B (Embolden), Ctrl + U (Underline), Ctrl + I (Italics)

Application Specific (Hard Coded/Client-Side) – Shortcuts which will always produce the same effect, such as loading the Wikipedia page for a selected work.

Presentation Interface (Server-Side) – Shortcuts whose action is determined by a server-side state, such as navigating to the next slide in a slideshow.

RESTful approach – Assigns resources to hard-coded URIs.

Mozilla Ubiquity – A mashup of web services accessible using a “natural-language” command interface, with users able to create their own commands using JavaScript, or subscribing to ones already created.

Alternative Interfaces

Oblong G-Speak – A spatial operating environment which uses a gestural movement interface to manipulate and interact with objects, in contrast to the common keyboard and mouse.

Microsoft Surface – A touch screen interface (in the form of a table) which responds to movement by touch, objects etc. which come into contact with its surface, including compatible phones, PDAs, and barcoded objects for example.

Lecture 5 (Week 6) – Glossary: Vocabulary of Terminology

• API
  • “An application programming interface (API) is a set of functions, procedures, methods, classes or protocols that an operating system, library or service provides to support requests made by computer programs.”
    
• REST
  • “Representational State Transfer (REST) works on top of HTTP and takes advantage of URLs as a sort of “command line interface”. In such an environment, one computer creates a URL defining a request from a second program or computer. Once received the second computer treats the URL as a command, processes it, and returns the results as an XML stream. REST does not dictate the shape of URLs beyond their existing specification, nor does REST define the format of the returned XML, as long as it is well-formed. Many people advocate the use of REST-ful Web Services, as they insure that services are “part of” the web, rather than “behind it” (simply put, they are always linkable).”
    “Representation State Transfer is intended to evoke an image of how a well-designed Web application behaves: a network of web pages (a virtual state-machine), where the user progresses through an application by selecting links (state transitions), resulting in the next page (representing the next state of the application) being transferred to the user and rendered for their use.”
• SOAP
  • “Originally defined as Simple Object Access Protocol, is a protocol specification for exchanging structured information in the implementation of Web Services in computer networks. It relies on Extensible Markup Language (XML) as its message format and usually relies on other Application Layer protocols, most notably Remote Procedure Call (RPC) and HTTP for message negotiation and transmission. SOAP forms the foundation layer of the web services protocol stack providing a basic messaging framework upon which abstract layers can be built.As a layman’s example of how SOAP procedures can be used, a SOAP message could be sent to a web service enabled web site, for example, a house price database, with the parameters needed for a search. The site will return an XML-formatted document with the resulting data (prices, location, features, etc). As the data is returned in a standardized machine-parsable format, it may be integrated directly into a third-party site.The SOAP architecture consists of several layers of specifications for message format, message exchange patterns (MEPs), underlying transport protocol bindings, message processing models, and protocol extensibility. SOAP is the successor of XML-RPC, though it borrows its transport and interaction neutrality and the envelope/header/body from elsewhere”.

• ATOM
  • “The name Atom applies to a pair of related standards. The Atom Syndication Format is an XML language used for web feeds, while the Atom Publishing Protocol (AtomPub or APP) is a simple HTTP-based protocol for creating and updating web resources.Web feeds allow software programs to check for updates published on a web site. To provide a web feed, a site owner may use specialized software (such as a content management system) that publishes a list (or “feed”) of recent articles or content in a standardized, machine-readable format. The feed can then be downloaded by web sites that syndicate content from the feed, or by feed reader programs that allow Internet users to subscribe to feeds and view their content.”
    “Atom Syndication Format: An XML-based syndication format used for Web “feeds”. It was derived from RSS (Really Simple Syndication) but is more defined and has a richer data format. Atom also has a complete API designed to handle publishing from posting to reading.”

• RSS
  • “RSS is a family of Web feed formats used to publish frequently updated works—such as blog entries, news headlines, audio, and video—in a standardized format. An RSS document (which is called a “feed”, “web feed”, or “channel”) includes full or summarized text, plus metadata such as publishing dates and authorship. Web feeds benefit publishers by letting them syndicate content automatically. They benefit readers who want to subscribe to timely updates from favored websites or to aggregate feeds from many sites into one place. RSS feeds can be read using software called an “RSS reader”, “feed reader”, or “aggregator”, which can be web-based or desktop-based. A standardized XML file format allows the information to be published once and viewed by many different programs. The user subscribes to a feed by entering the feed’s URI (often referred to non-technically as a URL) into the reader or by clicking an RSS icon in a browser that initiates the subscription process. The RSS reader checks the user’s subscribed feeds regularly for new work, downloads any updates that it finds, and provides a user interface to monitor and read the feeds.”
    
• HTML
  • “Hyper-Text Markup Language is used to create web pages for viewing on the WWW, known as hypertext documents, which must conform to the rules of HTML in order to be displayed correctly in a Web browser. The HTML syntax is based on a list of tags that describe the page’s content” and varying degrees of formatting. XHTML, CSS, JavaScript, and PHP among others all often use HTML as the base for pages in order to provide further content and functionality.
    
• XHTML
  • “The Extensible Hypertext Markup Language, or XHTML, is a markup language that has the same depth of expression as HTML, but also conforms to XML syntax.While HTML is an application of Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML), a very flexible markup language, XHTML is an application of XML, a more restrictive subset of SGML. Because they need to be well-formed, true XHTML documents allow for automated processing to be performed using standard XML tools—unlike HTML, which requires a relatively complex, lenient, and generally custom parser. XHTML can be thought of as the intersection of HTML and XML in many respects, since it is a reformulation of HTML in XML.”

• Headline Text
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• AJAX
  • “Asynchronous JavaScript and XML, or AJAX, is a group of interrelated web development techniques used for creating interactive web applications or rich Internet applications. With Ajax, web applications can retrieve data from the server asynchronously in the background without interfering with the display and behavior of the existing page.[1] Data is retrieved using the XMLHttpRequest object or through the use of Remote Scripting in browsers that do not support it. Despite the name, the use of JavaScript, XML, or its asynchronous use is not required.”
    
• JSON
  • “JavaScript Object Notation, is a lightweight computer data interchange format. It is a text-based, human-readable format for representing simple data structures and associative arrays (called objects)”. “The JSON format is often used for transmitting structured data over a network connection in a process called serialization. Its main application is in Ajax web application programming, where it serves as an alternative to the use of the XML format.Although JSON was based on a subset of the JavaScript programming language (specifically, Standard ECMA-262 3rd Edition—December 1999) and is commonly used with that language, it is considered to be a language-independent data format. Code for parsing and generating JSON data is readily available for a large variety of programming languages.”

• XML
  • “Extensible Markup Language (XML) is a general-purpose specification for creating custom markup languages. It is classified as an extensible language, because it allows the user to define the mark-up elements. XML’s purpose is aiding information systems share structured data, especially via the Internet, to encode documents, and to serialize data; in the last context, it compares with text-based serialization languages such as JSON and YAML.XML began as a simplified subset of the Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML), meant to be readable by people via semantic constraints; application languages can be implemented in XML. These include XHTML, RSS, MathML, GraphML, Scalable Vector Graphics, MusicXML, and others. Moreover, XML is sometimes used as the specification language for such application languages.”

• CSV
  • “A Comma separated values (CSV) file is a computer data file used for storage of data structured in a table form. Each line in the CSV file corresponds to a row in the table. Within a line, fields are separated by commas, each field belonging to one table column. CSV files are often used for moving tabular data between two different computer programs, for example between a database program and a spreadsheet program.”
    
• IFRAME
  • “Inline Frame is an HTML element which makes it possible to embed an HTML document inside another HTML document.The size of the IFrame can be specified in the surrounding HTML page, so that the surrounding page can already be presented in the browser while the IFrame is still being loaded. The IFrame behaves much like an inline image and the user can scroll it out of view. On the other hand, the IFrame can contain its own scroll bar, independent of the surrounding page’s scroll bar.While regular frames are typically used to logically subdivide the content of one website, IFrames are more commonly used to insert content (for instance an advertisement) from another website into the current page.”
    “The embedded document can be changed without reloading the surrounding page, by using the “target” attribute of an HTML anchor or by employing JavaScript. This makes many interactive applications possible, and IFrames are therefore commonly used by Ajax applications. The main alternative to using an IFrame in these situations is editing a document’s DOM tree. Sometimes invisible IFrames are also used for asynchronous communication with the server, as an alternative to XMLHTTPRequest.

    More recently, Mozilla Firefox, Opera and Microsoft Internet Explorer introduced contentEditable and designMode, which enables users to edit the contents of the HTML contained in an IFrame. This feature has been used to develop rich text (WYSIWYG) editors within an IFrame element like FCKeditor or TinyMCE. Popular web applications which make use of this feature include Google Docs & Spreadsheets (formerly Writely), JotSpot Live, and Windows Live Hotmail, to name a few.

    First introduced by Microsoft Internet Explorer in 1997 and long only available in that browser, iframes eventually became supported by all major brands.”

• KML
  • “Keyhole Markup Language (KML) is an XML-based language schema for expressing geographic annotation and visualization on existing or future Web-based, two-dimensional maps and three-dimensional Earth browsers. KML was developed for use with Google Earth, which was originally named Keyhole Earth Viewer. It was created by Keyhole, Inc, which was acquired by Google in 2004. The name “Keyhole” is a homage to the KH reconnaissance satellites, the original eye-in-the-sky military reconnaissance system first launched in 1976.
    The KML file specifies a set of features (placemarks, images, polygons, 3D models, textual descriptions, etc.) for display in Google Earth, Maps and Mobile, or any other 3D earth browser (geobrowser) implementing the KML encoding. Each place always has a longitude and a latitude. Other data can make the view more specific, such as tilt, heading, altitude, which together define a “camera view”. KML shares some of the same structural grammar as GML. Some KML information cannot be viewed in Google Maps or Mobile.

    KML files are very often distributed as KMZ files, which are zipped KML files with a .kmz extension. When a KMZ file is unzipped, a single “doc.kml” is found along with any overlay and icon images referenced in the KML.”

• Mashup
  • “In web development, a mashup is a web application that combines data from more than one source into a single integrated tool; an example is the use of cartographic data from Google Maps to add location information to real-estate data, thereby creating a new and distinct web service that was not originally provided by either source.Content used in mashups is typically obtained from a third party source via a public interface or API (web services). Other methods of obtaining content for mashups include Web feeds (e.g. RSS or Atom), and screen scraping. Many people are experimenting with mashups using Amazon, eBay, Flickr, Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and YouTube APIs, which has led to the creation of mashup editors.”

• Widget
  • “In computer programming, a widget (or control) is an element of a graphical user interface (GUI) that displays an information arrangement changeable by the user, such as a window or a text box. The defining characteristic of a widget is to provide a single interaction point for the direct manipulation of a given kind of data. Widgets are basic visual building blocks which, combined in an application, hold all the data processed by the application and the available interactions on this data.A family of common reusable widgets has evolved for holding general information based on the PARC research for the Xerox Alto User Interface. Different implementations of these generic widgets are often packaged together in widget toolkits, which programmers use to build graphical user interfaces (GUIs). Most operating systems include a set of ready-to-tailor widgets that a programmer can incorporate in an application, specifying how it is to behave. Each type of widgets generally is defined as a class by object-oriented programming (OOP). Therefore, many widgets are derived from class inheritance.

    Widgets are sometimes qualified as virtual to distinguish them from their physical counterparts, e.g. virtual buttons that can be clicked with a mouse cursor, vs. physical buttons that can be pressed with a finger.

    A related (but different) concept is the desktop widget, a small specialized GUI application that provides some visual information and/or easy access to frequently used functions such as clocks, calendars, news aggregators, calculators and desktop notes. These kinds of widgets are hosted by a widget engine.”

    “A web widget is a portable chunk of code that can be installed and executed within any separate HTML-based web page by an end user without requiring additional compilation. They are derived from the idea of code reuse. Other terms used to describe web widgets include: gadget, badge, module, webjit, capsule, snippet, mini and flake. Web widgets often but not always use DHTML, JavaScript, or Adobe Flash. Widgets often take the form of on-screen tools (clocks, event countdowns, auction-tickers, stock market tickers, flight arrival information, daily weather etc) that draw on Internet data-bases to show the information on the users ‘widget’ so a web-browser does not need to be used.”

• URL Encoding
  • “URLs can only be sent over the Internet using the ASCII character-set.

    Since URLs often contains characters outside the ASCII set, the URL has to be converted. URL encoding converts the URL into a valid ASCII format.

    URL encoding replaces unsafe ASCII characters with “%” followed by two hexadecimal digits corresponding to the character values in the ISO-8859-1 character-set.

    URLs cannot contain spaces. URL encoding normally replaces a space with a + sign.”
    

• UTF-8
  • “UTF-8 (8-bit UCS/Unicode Transformation Format) is a variable-length character encoding for Unicode. It is able to represent any character in the Unicode standard, yet the initial encoding of byte codes and character assignments for UTF-8 is backwards compatible with ASCII. For these reasons, it is steadily becoming the preferred encoding for e-mail, web pages, and other places where characters are stored or streamed.

    UTF-8 encodes each character (code point) in one to four octets (8-bit bytes), with the 1-byte encoding used for the 128 US-ASCII characters.”
    

References/Bibliography:

API – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/API
REST – http://wiki.osuosl.org/display/OCKPub/ORMDefinitions, www.xfront.com/REST.ppt
SOAP – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SOAP_(protocol)
ATOM – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ATOM, http://blog.pint.com/2007/06/19/a-web-20-glossary-part-1-of-2/
RSS – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSS
HTML – http://srdc.msstate.edu/ecommerce/curricula/farm_mgmt/glossary.htm
XHTML – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xhtml
AJAX – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AJAX
JSON – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JSON
XML – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XML
CSV (format) – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comma-separated_values
IFRAME – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IFRAME
KML – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kml
Mashup – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mashup_(web_application_hybrid)
Widget – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GUI_widget, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_widget
URL Encoding – http://www.w3schools.com/TAGS/ref_urlencode.asp
UTF-8 – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UTF-8

Lecture 4 and Week 5 – Research: Other Web 2.0 Topics

Social Networking
Blogging
Media Sharing
Rich Internet Applications
Data Integration
Encyclopedias
User Product Reviews
Mapping
News Sites
Micro Blogging
Peer-to-Peer (P2P)
Social Bookmarking (human tagging)

Lecture 4 and Week 5 – Research: Web 2.0 Topic

Micro Blogging

What is micro blogging

-    Electronic publishing of short entries to be viewable in a public or private domain.
-    Usually limited to around 140 characters; 20 shorter than a standard SMS.
-    Similar to status update features provided by many social networks, but with a dedicated focus.
-    Also similar to standard blogging but with a shift to near real-time publishing of bite-size chunks of information.
-    Major services first came into the public domain in early 2006, when Facebook launched its status update on March 1st, followed by Jaiku being launched on July 10th.

What does it provide

-    Micro blogging is not intended to replace any existing technologies such as e-mail, SMS, social networking, or standard blogging.
-    Intended to provide portable communication for keeping in touch with people, especially groups such as colleagues, travellers, friends etc.
-    Infrastructure is based around access by mobile devices such as cell phones, PDAs, and laptops, as well as regular static Web users.
-    Messages can be submitted in a number of ways such as text messaging, hosted web applications, e-mail, and instant messaging.

What is its purpose

-    Each micro blogging service has a different goal and ethos behind it, such as aiding business travellers to keep in touch with other employees in the field, synchronise schedules, update family and friends of daily events, and arranging activities.
-    Another spin on micro blogging is corporate use to provide information, or links of where to find information, to users.
-    Examples of this are service related notifications, such as if a server or service goes down, a gym is shut, or a meeting is cancelled etc.
-    A popular use is also to provide sports updates, news, and other information, in real time from the side-lines. This could be just the score, or a link to a full article on the half-time changes at a football match.

Tiny URLs

-    One powerful tool for allowing micro blogging to be successful is the ability to shorten URIs into smaller links which can more easily fit into the allowed character space.
-    http://tinyurl.com/ provides this service which indexes a submitted address and allocates a short ID to it.
-    Using the Tiny URL then invokes a lookup procedure on the provider’s server which returns the stored full URI.
-    A preview of the full URL can be viewed by prefixing the Tiny URL with “preview.”, preventing unwanted sites from being viewed.

Example of tiny url

The when

-    Since the widespread uptake of social networking, blogging, and interrelated services such as picture and video sharing, micro blogging evolved to enhance and expand the currently available options for communication.
-    Advances in cloud computing, advanced distributed systems, Web 2.0, Wi-Fi, and mobile devices (such as touch screen phones) has provided the perfect opportunity to take advantage of the mobile communication market.
-    Although mobile messaging has been around for years, social norms have progressed in regard to the type and amount of information people are willing to place online.
-    Having a touch screen full qwerty keyboard also makes it much easier to compose a micro blog.
-    Once the well renowned Facebook  introduced its “status update” other smaller ventures broke into the newly forming market to specialise in the field.

The who

-    There are now many different micro blogging sites, some of the main competitors in the current market being:
-    Twitter
-    Tumblr
-    Plurk
-    Jaiku
-    BrightKite
-    Dopplr
-    Pownce
-    Yammer
-    Many of these smaller sites provide add-on services to other networks such as Facebook and Myspace etc, allowing users to integrate their blogging and make life simpler.

Market competition

-    Twitter is currently the largest micro blogging service, with over 3.2 million accounts registered as of October 2008 (according to twitdir.com).
-    As with any registration statistics this does not convey actual usage as the accounts are free and may not be used frequently or at all.
-    Twitter asks “What are you doing?”, with which all user responses are based around.
-    It states that it is for friends, family, and co-workers to stay connected, however the wider community can also use public feeds to find out what others are doing, and what news people are talking about.

Traffic comparison

-    By looking at the amount of traffic certain micro blogging sites have received a more accurate insight can be gained as to the market share of individual providers.
-    Using the online traffic comparison site Alexa, three of the most popular micro blogging sites were analysed, and the averages of their daily page views over a number of months plotted on the following graph.
-    “Page views are the total number of Alexa [surveyed] user URL requests for a site. However, multiple requests for the same URL on the same day by the same user are counted as a single pageview.” (http://www.alexa.com/site/help/?index=12)
-    For more traffic analysis of Twitter and Plurk visit http://www.xarj.net/2008/twitter-vs-plurk/
-    The comparison chart below (#1) shows the page views of Twitter, Tumblr, and Plurk, with Twitter not only maintaining but increasing its lead over the competition.
-    The comparison chart below (#2) shows the page views of Twitter compared to the popular social networking sites Facebook and Bebo.

(#1) Comparison of Micro Blogging Page Views

(#2) Comparison of Twitter and Social Networking Sites

Current features

-    Many micro blogging sites provide a range of features, whilst others focus on a minimalistic and dedicated approach.
-    Some of the functionality currently available is:
-    Full blogging
-    Podcasting
-    Text messaging
-    Picture and video sharing
-    File-sharing
-    Calendars and scheduling
-    Graphic spatial time-line of publishing and events

New directions

-    Some ideas for new additions to micro blogging could be:
-    Integration with GPS for tracking purposes
-    Close the gap between blogging and micro blogging by allowing more or a selectable number of characters, thus not limiting the service and either forcing potential users to use full, less portable blogs, or discouraging people from sharing such information at all.

Technology involved

-    Twitter uses Ruby on Rails (RoR) to provide the service and API for integrating with other services and applications.
-    Problems have been experienced using the language involving scalability resulting in service outages, especially to the prominent instant messaging , leading to rumoured plans for moving away from the “Rails” to Ruby, or to another language such as PHP or Java; requiring a complete re-design.
-    Plurk uses AJAX to implement its spatial timeline and graphic interface, using similar server-side coding for implementing the architecture, although using their own APIs.

Unique points and usage

-    Despite many other services providing similar communication features as micro blogging it has the advantage of convenience, portability, simplicity, and integration with other services.
-    As can be seen from the traffic analysis micro blogging is far off being as popular as social networking sites such as Facebook, Myspace, and Bebo, although it is a relatively new technology and has been steadily accumulating users.
-    From a corporate standpoint micro blogging has substantial beneficial gain, providing business travellers with a convenient platform for keeping in touch with others, both in the office and on location.

Controversy over adoption

-    From a social standpoint micro blogging can have detrimental effects, similar to those argued for social networking, such as the growth of cyber-bullying due to the growing availability of simple publication mediums.
-    “Twittering” on a near real-time basis is inevitably going to introduce a large quantity of data to be stored and accessible online, of which much will be useless to most people.
-    Compulsive adoption could lead to further decline in real-world socialisation, as has been the case with IM and social networking, by introducing more reasons to simply use the Internet.

Most appropriate uses

-    In my opinion Twitter hits a few specific parts of the communication and publiction market:
-     Integration with social networks for real-time news.
-    Updating groups of people about events when on-the move
-    Sharing web links, information, and resources in real-time
-    Providing service updates
-    Sports scores and headlines
-    Location based social networking (e.g. BrightKite)
-    In contrast, large communications with others to give meaningful  information or updates can be done on Wikipedia and using e-mail, quick questions and private messages to individuals or small groups by using SMS.

Further Information

-    http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/05/01/twitter-said-to-be-abandoning-ruby-on-rails/ – Rumoured change of language for Twitter
-    http://www.xarj.net/2008/twitter-vs-plurk/ – Twitter Vs Plurk traffic analysis
-    http://bostonmediadomain.com/2008/09/28/status-microblogging-blogosphere/ – Status of micro blogging companies
-    http://cosminghiu.com/blog/2007/09/11/top-5-micro-blogging-websites/ – Top 5 micro blogging sites
-    http://www.alexa.com/ – Traffic analysis tool
-    http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1348556 – Why we Twitter
-    http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1378620 – Micro-Blog: Sharing and Querying Content Through Mobile Phones and Social Participation
-    http://tinyurl.com – URL conversion tool
-    http://headsurge.wordpress.com – Research performed on micro blogging.