What are you doing now?

Hands up if you use sites like twitter and facebook? Just like me, you've seen these services/sub-features that let you create a micro-blog - a series of 1 liner anecdotes about what you are currently doing. You've also used them. So how useful are they?

Well, it depends on how much information you can put into a single sentence. In this time of verbosity - where information is becoming more complex, and harder to put across - there is still an undercurrent of everyday life that can be represented at the short-end of the information spectrum.

It also depends on your language skills, and here there's a tough dichotomy of sorts.

The syntax and nomencalture used in text messaging - an offshoot of the fact that once-upon-a-time SMS messages could be no longer than 160 characters - evolved to be as short, precise and - well - universal as possible. So today's generation has some foreknowledge of succinct methods of communication.

But looking at the standards of english that students are coming out of school with nowadays, you could be forgiven for thinking that to-the-point could mean meaningless.

Fortunately, we aren't trying to teach physics or shakespear by the humble micro-blog. We might be OK then, so long as we stick to the facts we know best - our own lives, and the dealings we have around us.

Everyday happenings are simple, succinct and universal. If I have a toothache, and I want to tell my world of friends on Facebook, then I can say "Alex has a toothache, and jeez does it hurt", and then I can expect equally to-the-point messages of sympathy back.

Never before have we been in a position to give people realtime news about the minute humdrum goings-on of our day-to-day. In circles of family and friends, sometimes this can be a very powerful outlet that allows one to share how they are feeling, maybe about the passing of a loved one or the joy of a new baby.

By the every-day, normal nature of the "information current" contained in these live-fed sentences about our lives, one really needs a simple gadget that one could use at any time, at virtually no cost, to allow one to post information out into the ether. Has anyone got a new mobile phone I could borrow, my plant needs watering???

Microblogging is, to me, a good thing if the content is to be shared with those who are close to us.