As you know, the rumour is that the cool kids aren’t blogging anymore. Oh no, they’re microblogging (Twitter, Facebook), or what I’m going to call miniblogging (tumblr, Posterous, Soup.io). Miniblogging is more than status updates, but not as onerous as a fully-fledged blog.

This category has really taken off in the last year. The not-so-reliable figures from Compete suggest their number of users has trebled over the last twelve months, something that you’ll already know anecdotally from the number of links you’ve encountered to these sites in your daily reading.

These sites are very similar in most respects, with a few genre-defining characteristics:

• Automatic import of social network content e.g. photos from flickr, delicious bookmarks.
• Quick posting using a bookmarklet (a javascript activated from a bookmark in your browser’s toolbar).
• Emphasis on frequent, short-form content rather than lengthy essays.
• Easy to repost others’ content, something that’s encouraged and seen as a mark of respect rather than ripping people off.
• Content is often ephemeral.
• Posts likely to be ‘secondary’ information – a youtube video, a picture you found elsewhere, a quote from someone in a mainstream website source.

Tumblr has been around the longest. And appears to be the market leader, with around three times the users of the other two. The different networks have a slightly different vibe. Tumblr users seem to be younger (on average), more likely to post images or multimedia than words and the site seems more sociable than the others. There are some great music blogs on it. It also picked up some geek appeal through the ability to automatically pick up on tags or a custom RSS feed such as the PRFail blog. Perhaps most crucially on its path to mainstream acceptance, the platform has also attracted celebrities such as Katy Perry and John Legend.

Posterous is technically superior to Tumblr, with its killer post-by-email feature taking a lot of pain out of posting from a mobile, posting MP3s and video. It also does a clever automatic posting to your other sites depending on rules you choose. Despite (or maybe because of) these technical innovations, though, it appears to have attracted a smaller but wordier crew, who use the platform as an easier, cheaper blog. A lot of the people whose regular blogs I follow have adopted Posterous as a lower-commitment, low maintenance secondary site (e.g. Steve Rubel, Charlie Peverett).

I’ve tried all of them and have currently settled on the underdog Soup.io as a secondary site. I set up a tumblr a long time ago but made the mistake of making it a lifestream site. As it turns out, my life is quite boring and trivial, especially if you’re not me, so the site was boring and trivial too. Posterous seemed like a good idea, but I realised I was using it as a proxy for posting here, which seemed a bit pointless. I was looking for four things, ultimately:

• a better bookmarking site than delicious, one that would capture pictures, videos, and music as well as bookmarks.
• a scrapbook for things I find interesting and want to keep/share but don’t warrant a blog post here. Sometimes it’s a place where I gather materials for a future article.
• some curation of my social networks – it automatically gathers favourites from youtube, ffffound, visualize.us etc. Theoretically, I will be able to find these later without visiting lots of separate sites.
• but without the boring bits – it doesn’t gather status updates or twitter conversations.

The Soup.io platform is not perfect any means – navigation and search are rather too minimal when it comes to finding things you posted more than a few days ago. You can use tags, but there’s no tag cloud. There aren’t any categories. There are permalinks, but they don’t contain any intelligible information. However, it looks OK out of the box, and the posting bookmarklet is fantastic. There’s also pretty much no limit on how much you post or import.

There’s a bigger worry over this whole sector, though.

None of these platforms currently have any form of advertising, premium features or any other way to make their business sustainable. That’s a worry if you post much content direct to the site. It would feel like a terrible waste if your site’s owners went bust and closed down the server. Lifestreaming non-starter Storytlr will presumably not be the last site in this crowded sector to be closed down.

The trouble is that if (say) tumblr starts posting advertising on people’s pages, their users could easily dump the platform and move to a competitor. The same goes for premium features: if one started to offer (say) a lightbox plug-in for snazzier picture display as a $5 a month extra, its competitors would be motivated to immediately offer the same feature for free.

So is miniblogging doomed? Or all but one of them?

Not quite, but it’s tricky. Survivors might focus on offering a technical USP that its competitors can’t match, which seems unlikely, and not necessarily a saving grace, as the tumblr vs posterous figures show. Otherwise, they could try to create loyalty to the platform, which is again improbable since their whole attraction is low commitment. There are social features on each, which could work to spark the loyalty of users – but these tend to be very lo-fi – I find it hard to believe that many people care about the number of Posterous subscribers they have, for example. Similarly, I can’t see the trick of offering brands their own pages for a sizeable fee working too well, since they don’t have anywhere near the reach of Facebook or MySpace fan pages.

To me, the solution lies in greater differentiation. It’s not the case that only one of these platforms can win, but they do need to become different from each other. For as long as the format and features are the same on each, then they are after exactly the same users, which is very clearly a less-than-zero-sum game.

Tumblr has attracted creatives, as I mentioned, and so maybe should do more to allow art works, music and photography to be seen/heard at their best. Perhaps build in a really simple ecommerce solution so that artists can sell or license their content. Posterous could perhaps do more for wordsmiths, or go completely the opposite direction and create a paid-for review platform (I don’t condone this, but it seems to be a business model). Maybe one site should get serious about being all-about multimedia bookmarking; or get serious about being a collaboration platform.

There’s still the threat that competitors will implement every new feature, but the more these sites define their niches, probably as directed by existing user behaviour, the less likely it becomes that this will happen, since those competitors would blur the definitions of their own niches by doing so.

There is a fever of anticipation over the imminent release of a tablet-style computer from Apple – let’s call it the iSlate [Thursday Update — actually, let’s call it the iPad — I stand by everything else in the post, though].

Nobody outside the company knows very much about how it works or its specifications, but the consensus of opinion is that it’s basically a big iPhone. Let’s imagine that’s the case, and I’ll write an apology on Thursday if this turns out to be very wrong.

It’s not just Apple that thinks that 2010 will be the year when Tablets finally come of age. Models from HP and Nokia were just two of the slew unveiled at CES a couple of weeks ago.

Now, I know that Apple UX design expertise means that their device will be poles apart from the Tablet PCs launched by these competitors or Microsoft hardware partners in the noughties, but it won’t be entirely different. The latter part of that is interesting to me, because I spent quite a lot of time with those devices, reviewing them for trade and consumer press titles. What I discovered is that they’re good at some things and less so at others.

Good for:

• Reading things – but not very long things – they still had LCD screens, so still created eye fatigue. Fine for a magazine article or a blog post, though.
• Filling in forms – the devices proved popular with people like service engineers, medical doctors and financial services salespeople.
• Drawing things – it’s easier to draw freehand using something like a pen, rather than something like a mouse or a touchpad.

Not so good for:

• Typing more than a few words – some had convertible designs whereby you could unfold a keyboard, but that made them bulkier.
• Surviving in your bag – the screen needs covering so needs a sturdy secondary case, which means it takes longer to get out and at work than a conventional laptop.

In a story today that looks not totally dissimilar from industrial espionage, a research firm called Flurry has apparently tracked the application usage coming out of Apple’s headquarters to reveal some suggestions of the use cases the company is anticipating:

The mix of apps is made up mostly of media and entertainment titles, as opposed to productivity or entertainment programs — underscoring that the tablet is aimed at consumers. [my emphasis]

“In particular, there was a strong trend toward news, books and other kinds of daily media consumption, including streaming music and radio,” stated the report. Coupled with recent reports that Apple is in talks with book and newspaper publishers, the apps suggest the tablet will compete with Amazon’s Kindle e-reading device.

Across the “tablet” apps Flurry identified, it also found a strong emphasis on social networking, photo sharing and other types of social interaction.

I hope you can see where this is going: iSlate and social media in a world where all right-thinking people are toting an iSlate. Web 2.0 is all about people creating online content: wikipedia, blogs, flickr, twitter, whatever. Slate computing devices are good for consuming content – I think it’s safe to say that a modern slate will also do video quite well. And anything that’s similar to a big iPhone will have some sort of GPS capability and the capacity for Location Based Services (LBS). They’re good for creating certain kinds of content – especially pictures, but not really for creating text content. I can imagine that up-to-140-characters will be fine, but your hand will get tired after that point.

So — in a slate-enabled future of social media expect…

More: microblogging, drawings, tagging, one-click sharing, LBS, pro media by the microchunk (iNews).

Fewer: blogs, wikipedians, lengthy comments.

This is bad in some ways, of course. Social media is already criticised for its superficiality. I cannot imagine that being able to write less will improve this image problem. On the other hand, blogging and wikipeding are already far too onerous for most people, so you could say this was simply being responsive to what people mainly want to do. Perhaps more worrying is the idea that there will be less authorship in this world and more spreading and curating. Perhaps fancifully, I like to think that the ability for anyone to self-publish is an empowering thing. I wouldn’t like to think that my ability to do so would be impeded by my choice of computer hardware.

One things I will be very interested in is the camera capabilities of the device. I cannot, for the life of me, imagine people taking a photo using a tablet, no matter who designed it, but am prepared to be corrected.

Picture: iPed Multitouch Slate by Myiube