I've been thinking a lot about where different types of writing live on a spectrum. Not in some academic way, but practically—where do you write when you have something to say?

There's this invisible gradient between Twitter and Medium. Between the instant dopamine of social media and the carefully polished blog post that takes weeks. And most of us are trapped at one end or the other, when what we really need is the middle.

The Social Media Side: Fast and Disposable

Twitter is brilliant at one thing: capturing ideas in real-time. A thought strikes you, you tweet it, and seconds later someone from Japan is responding. The friction is nearly zero. You hit send and it's done.

But here's what gnaws at me about social media: it's all borrowed land. You're writing someone else's algorithm into oblivion. The beauty of your insight gets buried under the avalanche of infinite scroll. And worse, platforms disappear or change their rules overnight. I've watched entire communities vanish when algorithms shifted.

The permanence is a lie. Yes, your tweet technically exists somewhere, but try finding something you wrote two years ago. Good luck. It's practically ephemeral.

Social media optimizes for engagement, not expression. You learn to write for virality, not for truth. You craft hooks instead of thoughts.

The Blog Side: Slow and Polished

Then there's the traditional blog. The real estate you own. The place where you can take your time, write 2,000 words, add images, polish every sentence until it shines.

I admire bloggers. There's something noble about writing long-form. The pressure to make it perfect, to research thoroughly, to connect ideas across multiple paragraphs—it creates better writing.

But blogs have their own trap: the perfection barrier. You sit down to write and suddenly you're thinking about structure, SEO, whether the opening hook is compelling enough. By the time you've written five paragraphs, you've second-guessed yourself a dozen times.

And the frequency problem is real. A blog post takes days or weeks. So you write less. The gap between posts grows. People forget you exist.

There's also the infrastructure tax. You need a website. You need to maintain it. There's friction in every step, which means fewer people write blogs at all.

The Spectrum in Between

What if you wanted something different?

What if you wanted to write something that takes 15 minutes, not 15 hours, but that you'd actually want people to find in a year?

What if you wanted ownership of your words without the perfectionism paralysis?

What if you wanted frequency without disposability?

This is what a microblog is supposed to be. And I think we've been using the term wrong.

A microblog isn't just a short blog post. It's not Twitter without the algorithm. It's a different thing entirely—it's the middle ground that lets you be quick and thoughtful.

You can write a few paragraphs about something that occurred to you this morning. No one's expecting it to be Pulitzer-worthy. But it's yours, it's indexed, it's there when someone searches for it next year. It compounds over time.

The format doesn't demand perfection. It just demands clarity. You can publish something real without performing for an audience.

Why This Gap Exists

I think the gap exists because the platforms that dominated the last decade forced us to choose. Twitter made you choose speed. Medium and Substack made you choose depth.

Nobody built the middle ground well. Not really. Not at scale.

Microblogs existed in theory—they were supposed to be the next evolution of blogging. But they got swallowed by platforms chasing engagement metrics, or ignored by people who wanted the stability of traditional blogging.

So most of us ended up choosing: either we write for the algorithm, or we write for ourselves (and hope others find us).

When to Use Each

I think about it this way now:

Twitter/Social Media is for your network. It's for participating in real-time conversations. It's where you respond, react, engage. The ephemeral nature is actually a feature—you're not trying to create lasting value, you're trying to be present.

A Blog is for your best ideas. The ones worth 2,000 words. The ones that deserve to be read years from now and still hold up. It's for essays, comprehensive guides, deep dives.

A Microblog is for everything in between. It's for observations, half-baked ideas, updates, reflections. It's for the writing that's too long for Twitter but doesn't need to be a full essay. It's for building in public. It's for being yourself without the performance pressure.

The microblog is where you develop your ideas in the open. Where you discover what you think by writing. Where you build an audience that actually knows you, because they've seen your real thoughts, not your curated ones.

Why It Matters

Here's what I've realized building Jottings: the microblog matters because it's the format that lets ordinary people write extraordinary things.

Not extraordinary in the viral sense. Extraordinary in the sense of true.

It's the format that rewards consistency over perfection. It's the format that makes you want to write regularly because there's no pressure for it to be a "post." It's the format where your thoughts can sit in the sun for a while before they're ready to become a bigger essay.

Most importantly, it's owned. Your words live on your site, served under your domain, searchable and findable and permanent.

The spectrum between social media and blogs has always needed something in the middle. I think we finally built it. And I think you should use it.

Write your thoughts. Keep them. Make them yours.

That's the microblog difference.