Microblogs: A detail too much?

By Wailin Wong

Chicago Tribune

In cyberspace, no status update is too small to share with friends, family and strangers, including this:

In Franklin, Tenn., an office worker reports that he just shuffled over from his desk to the couch. A biker in Orange, Calif., is headed to Starbucks. Elsewhere in California, someone just got coffee up his nose.

You might think no one would care – but on the Internet someone might.

Thanks to “microblogging,” the slightest bits of detritus from people’s lives are steadily flowing into the maw of the Internet, enabling a new wave of communication in which no detail is too mundane or brief to share.

The idea, born of the confessional nature of personal blogging, is to capture fleeting thoughts or briefly record a moment of the day, sharing them instantly with friends in a line or two via the Web or a mobile phone text message. Microblogging, through sites such as Twitter, is a way to connect for a generation that doesn’t write letters and sometimes finds e-mailing too time consuming.

“It’s kind of like keeping in touch with your friends when you or they don’t have the time to keep in touch otherwise,” said Naz Hamid, 30, the creative director of local blog Gapers Block.

For those outside the growing world of social media, the increasing appeal of such seeming self-indulgence is puzzling and may be alarming, suggesting that the online generation’s attention span has gotten even shorter and more focused on itself.

There has always been an undercurrent of irritation with the ultra-confessional nature of the Web. Yet the backlash hasn’t occurred. Instead, social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace have edged into the mainstream, encouraging more people to put their personal lives online. Both Facebook and MySpace have features where members can post a brief line about what they’re doing or thinking at the moment.

For the current generation, there is no such thing as too much information; its members are adept at managing the vast flow.

“I’m not sure it’ll ever end,” said Michael Brito, who is Intel’s “social media evangelist” and recently rejected his 6-year-old daughter’s request to join Twitter. “I can have the TV on, be on e-mail, instant messenger and Twitter, and I still feel like I have a good grasp of what’s going on around me. I don’t think it’s over. I’m looking at my daughter and kids her age, and I think it’s just going to continue to evolve.”

In the case of Twitter, founded in 2006, the site’s growth has surprised even some of its users. Chicagoan Andrew Huff, 33, started using Twitter in 2007 at South by Southwest, an annual music, film and technology festival in Austin, Texas. Attendees used Twitter on their cell phones to organize social gatherings on the sidelines of the event. He thought he would ditch Twitter after the festival. But for Huff, who works from home as co-editor of Gapers Block, Twitter “became my water-cooler chat, a running conversation with your co-workers at the next desk.”

Twitter, based in San Francisco, won’t disclose its number of users but says it has grown sixfold in the past 12 months. Part of Twitter’s success is that the site has opened itself up to the wider universe of social networking Web sites and applications – users can sync their miniposts with updates on their Facebook or MySpace profile pages, for example.

An entire cottage industry of Twitter-related sites has also sprung up. These include Twiddict, which stores users’ posts if the original site goes down, and Twittervision, where visitors can see speech balloons pop up in real time on a map of the world. Another site, Summize, allows computer users to search Twitter posts, which are often publicly accessible.

Still, with so much online noise, fatigue is inevitable. Many Twitter members regularly “un-follow” people if their contact list grows too long. They also grow more selective in what they read regularly. These are coping mechanisms for people who are deeply involved in their online communities.

“A lot of us hate the people who just Twitter what the traffic’s like every day and that their flight is delayed again,” said Chicagoan Dan Buczaczer. He prefers to use the site to keep in casual contact with friends or share ideas that would otherwise “get stuffed into your brain and forgotten about.”

“There’s something fun about people you like and respect all sharing those little instantaneous moments of inspiration, whether they end up being good or bad,” he said.

Buczaczer, 36, used his cell phone to send Twitter updates during the delivery of his daughter last year. Months later, he reread his old posts and fondly recalled the offhand observations he wouldn’t have recorded otherwise – such as how the anesthesiologist resembled Peyton Manning. Buczaczer did put aside his cell phone, digital camera and laptop during the last two hours to handle “other tasks, like supporting the wife.”

Huff and others are also experimenting with sites such as FriendFeed that help manage social data. On FriendFeed, members can see a rundown of Internet activity by everyone within their network, such as postings on Twitter, photos uploaded on Flickr or a review written for Yelp. FriendFeed supports more than 40 sites.

FriendFeed co-founder Bret Taylor said his site is designed to be very personalized, with members forming small networks around common interests. The more intimate nature ensures that online sharing “evolves to the level of interaction that is typical of social groups,” said Taylor, who believes his site alleviates social fatigue.

But there is another method of dealing with too much info: unplugging.

“I go through waves where I don’t want to be on” Twitter, Hamid said, “and don’t want to see anything on it.

“I don’t want to look at my computer some days.”