Curse Of The Microbloggers.(The Technologist)(Internet social sites)

Byline: Brian Braiker

The first thing Amanda Mooney, 22, does when she wakes up in the morning is fire up her laptop. She opens "a crazy amount of tabs" and checks in on her Facebook, MySpace, Flickr and YouTube friends. A self-described "digital native" who graduated from Emerson College in Boston this summer, Mooney contributes her thoughts to her new employer's blog at edelmandigital.com, as well as at americanshelflife.com. She chats on AIM, publicly bookmarks favorite posts on Digg and Del.icio.us. And, of course, she twitters. And twitters and twitters.

On Twitter, the service that lets you keep the world abreast of your doings in 140 characters or fewer, "you post a thought and you never know who is going to jump in and join that conversation with you," says Mooney. "You sort of forget that it's a really, really public form of [instant messaging]." She's reviewed the new movie "Wanted," shared a dream about standing in line to buy the new iPhone and sent out links to new sites she has found interesting.

For Mooney and the million-odd microbloggers out there, no thought, however trivial, goes undigitized. First there was Facebook--where members are able to share instant thoughts or whereabouts with their social network by writing a pithy "status update" (example: "Brian is writing a story about microblogging"). And then along came Twitter, which allows users to post very short messages to, and receive them from, a network of contacts, either from the Twitter Web site or via text messages. Instead of sending a dozen e-mails or messages, you send one to your Twitter account, and the service distributes it to all your friends. Members use Twitter to organize impromptu gatherings, carry on a group conversation or just send a quick update to let people know what's going on. Now there is a rash of new self-publishing tools that seem to launch on a weekly basis. In the last few months alone, services like identi.ca, Pownce and Plurk have popped up. Tumblr, launched last year, allows people to subscribe to--or follow--each other's "tumblelogs."

Posterous, which made its debut earlier this month, is the latest service. It is already making Tumblr seem archaic by bypassing the need to go to a Web site to write a post--or even embed a video. On Posterous, users start an account and publish new posts entirely via e-mail to post@posterous.com. In its first week 6,000 bloggers registered with Posterous, according to cofounder Sachin Agarwal.

Investors in Posterous may be happy about the service's initial popularity, but how many blogging services does the world actually need? "The problem is that people are launching a whole new service based on one feature," says Sean Bonner, who copublishes Metroblogging, a ...