The Ubiquitous and Increasingly
Significant Status Message
bernard J. Jansen
The Pennsylvania State University | [e-mail]
abdur chowdury
Twitter, Inc.| [e-mail]
geoff cook
myyearbook.com | [e-mail]
Who would have thought that
the status message would be
one of the hottest features on
the Web? This situation may be
hard to conceive of, given the
status message’s humble begin-
nings as a simple, practical away
notice in email applications and
instant-messaging services.

The status message has evolved from its lowly beginnings into a multidimensional feature and service addressing numerous social needs. It is a near ubiquitous feature in email applications, instant-messaging services, and social-networking sites upon which billion-dollar companies are built. Even the powerhouses of the Web, the search engines, have gotten onboard, with status-message boxes available on personalized search home pages and status messages reflecting near instantaneous temporal happenings now integrated with traditional search results.

Nowhere has the status mes-
sage made more of an impact
than on the social-networking
sites—MySpace, Facebook,
LinkedIn, my Yearbook, and
Orkut, as well as micro-commu-
nication sites such as Twitter.

The status message has achieved such importance in terms of, well, status, that there are even services that provide witty messages for you (e.g., http://www.awaymessages. com/ and http://tjshome.com/ statusmessages.php) in case you are too busy to compose them yourself. Controlling the content of status messages is now a facet of professional online reputation management (http:// www.prospectmx.com/social-network-online-reputation-man-agement-protection). Numerous companies provide status-message account-management services for other companies, organizations, and individuals. The major search engines have entered into agreements to access the stream of updated status messages from the major platforms, and there are several startup companies focused on providing status messages as search results. In sum, the status message is now big business with significant impact along multiple fronts.

What is a status message?
How are they used, and what
has made the status popular as
a Web service?

A status message is usually a short note that automatically appears as a feature of some client applications on the Web and is available to a large audience. A rough analogy would be a message on a telephone answering machine or a note stuck on a bulletin board. However, one can update a status message with relative ease. Therefore, status messages are updated frequently, serving as an instantaneous communication medium. Status messages are typically written in the third person, making them similar to announcements on news tickers, such as those seen on major television news channels. Although conceptually linked to blogging via terms such as micro-blogging, the status message is really a form of micro-communication, given its frequent updating and short length.

By short, we mean really
diminutive. A status message is
typically in the range of about
140 characters or less, which
is about 20 standard English
words. This word length is
similar to that of a newspaper
headline or sentence. Whether
by design or default, the sta-