Twitter Nation

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 less, "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). 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. Arguably the hippest  is Tumblr. Launched last year, it allows people to subscribe to—or follow—each other's "tumblelogs" and netted a bit of microfame for the odd vapid oversharer and facilitated the expression of at least one Garfield fan's flash of inspired genius.

The new kid on the block is Posterous, which made its debut last week and 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. All you need to do to launch a new blog—and update it—is send an e-mail to post@posterous.com. In its first week 6,000 bloggers registered with Posterous, according to cofounder Sachin Agarwal.

Posterous's initial popularity may be good for the company's investors, but how many blogging services does the world need anyway? "The problem is that people are launching a whole new service based on one feature," says Sean Bonner, who co-publishes Metroblogging, a large network of local blogs. "The reason Twitter is useful is because all your friends are there. If it was just you, it would be as useful as a piece of paper you write notes to yourself on."

Indeed, for now, Twitter appears to be winning the microblogging arms race. The service boasted an estimated 1.2 million unique visitors in May alone, and may be valued in the eye-popping neighborhood of $100 million. This all suggests that an instant 140-character "tweet" meets some communications needs better than a fleshed out blog post. (In April an American journalism student was arrested in Egypt for photographing a demonstration, his tweets alerted friends to what had happened—and ultimately got him sprung.)