The Ubiquitous and Increasingly
Significant Status Message
bernard J. Jansen
The Pennsylvania State University | jjansen@acm.org
abdur chowdury
Twitter, Inc.| abdur@ir.iit.edu
geoff cook
myyearbook.com | gcook@myyearbook.com
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-