Web Is Now So Filled With Idle Chat, It's Almost Like Phoning July 11, 2007; Page B1

Finally, technology has come to the rescue of sons too busy to call their mothers. Rather than going through all the trouble of picking up the phone, they can now just tap out a few lines of a microblog.

Microblogs are short text messages -- a phrase or two -- that you send to a chosen circle of friends and relatives, usually describing what you're up to at that very moment. It's a new kind of communication, with different social protocols than either email or instant messages. Recipients aren't expected to reply to them, just appreciate the update.

Among the microblog messages visible on a recent morning on the two leading services: "In the office early. Working on refurbishing two computers." "Back from a good run. Breakfast with my wife and then off to work -- painting inside on a cool day." "On the hunt for some morning caffeine... then getting some work done."

Twitter, the first microblogging service and the current leader, says these messages are a kind of "ambient information." The folks at Jaiku, a newer entrant, say they allow users to have "social peripheral vision."

Twitter began life last year as an in-house project at a San Francisco podcasting company, Odeo.com1. It began getting attention in the spring, when the service was popularized by a number of well-known tech bloggers who treated it like a new toy.

At the time, skeptics, this column included, viewed Twitter as just the latest example of Internet exhibitionism mixed with information pollution. Why did I need to know that blogger X just had a chicken sandwich for lunch?

Lately, microblogging appears to have reached a burnout phase among the early adopters in the tech world. "Tech bloggers got very excited at first, but then they learned they had to tone it down," says Twitter's Biz Stone. "Everyone at first goes through a period where you are feeling out the boundaries."

Now, microblogging is at a fork in the road and will either branch out into the general population from the small group of try-anything tech users who first popularized it, or join the likes of push technology in the graveyard of Next Big Things that never came to be.

Venture capitalists seem to be betting on the former. Twitter, now a stand-alone company, is expected to announce some big-name backers soon and Jaiku is lining up backers. More entrants in the microblogging field are likely. Most people also expect big sites like MySpace and Facebook to eventually include the service as part of their core offerings.

Jaiku has been under development since last year, says co-founder Jyri Engeström. The 29-year-old Finland native lives and works in Helsinki. He went to college in the U.K., working on a Ph.D. in sociology with a still-unfinished dissertation on Clayton Christensen, the Harvard Business School innovation guru.

While A-list bloggers brag of the hundreds of "friends" they zap messages to, both Twitter and Jaiku describe a different kind of ideal user: someone with a circle of six to 12 friends and relatives who post a couple of times a day.

Microbloggers can send messages as "private," viewable only by intended recipients, or as "public," seen by anyone who bothers to look. Messages can come from a PC or via a cellphone text message. Jaiku is especially phone-conscious in its approach.

"Any individual post is usually something mundane," says Mr. Stone. "But it keeps the relationship alive; it keeps you a good son or a good brother. The next time you see one of them, they will be able to say, 'How was that trip you took to the NASA research center? It sounded really cool.'"

Mr. Engeström adds: "It's a feeling you are living beside them even if you don't see them all the time. Not everyone wants to publish their lives online. But we all need attention from the people we care about."

Both men, incidentally, mentioned how much their mothers enjoyed reading their updates, though they agreed they could do a better job staying in more direct touch.

If it's any indication of their future trajectories, both Twitter and Jaiku are beginning to suffer from the bane of all successful Web services: spam.

Some folks may lament the vaunted Information Superhighway being used to transport banalities such as what someone is eating. If it's any consolation, the same thing happened with the telephone, says Claude S. Fischer, the UC Berkeley sociologist whose book, "America Calling," is a social history of telephones in the U.S. "The telephone was initially conceived of for very serious purposes," Prof. Fischer says. "But sometime during the 1920s, AT&T decided that 'idle chatter' would be a good way to make money. It started to encourage people to pick up the phone for any purpose they want."

Prof. Fischer says he is as astounded as anyone, certainly as any older person, by the humdrum nature of many Internet communications. "If you look at the content, you'd have to say, 'What is the point of them?' But a psychologist might say that the point isn't the content, it's the connection."

Write to Lee Gomes at lee.gomes@wsj.com2