TORONTO - First came e-mail. Then text messaging and instant messaging. Blogging followed.
Now there's micro-blogging -- sharing life's big and small moments with the world, or just a handful of friends, through frequent, short messages. Among the dozens of micro-blogging sites popping up, San Francisco-based Twitter and Helsinki-based Jaiku lead the pack.
The concept is fairly simple -- users send messages of about 140-200 characters in length to those who have signed up to receive them. They can be sent by cellphone and routed to people on other networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace.
Posts can range from abstract thought to answering basic questions, like "What are you doing now?"
It's gaining so much steam that users of Twitter have developed their own lingo -- a post is called a tweet, users are dubbed twitterers and the cyberspace they take up is referred as the twitosphere.
There are even sites that track Twitter news, such as Twittown and Twitterati.
Fans have created over 100 applications for Twitter, including one for the IPhone and another that uses Google maps to illustrate where twitterers are posting from Twittiwn.
Twitter co-founder Biz Stone said he was stunned by the amount of time people have spent building those applications.
"I don't think we expected that much attention to it," said Stone.
And it's not just kids who are catching micro-blogging fever. Adopters include professionals and politicians such as U.S. Democratic presidential hopefuls Barack Obama and John Edwards, who use it to keep followers up-to-date from the campaign trail.
Media outlets are also catching wind of the trend. Al-Jazeera has a Twitter feed, as do the New York Times and the BBC. Users receiving the feeds get headlines from the services.
The attraction of micro-blogging, say devotees, is its simplicity, the ability to post using cellphones and the breezy nature of the short entries.
"You can do it anywhere, any time without having to fire up your laptop or be at your desk," said avid Jaiku user Frank Linhares, a political adviser to the NDP party and self-professed geek who produces an online program called "Digital Underground."
Linhares simply uses his BlackBerry to send an SMS message to his Jaiku account, instantly updating his network of friends and acquaintances.
"If you want to follow people, trying to read everyone's blog becomes a very time-consuming thing. Twitter and tumblelog allow you to express yourself in one or two sentences," he said. "It makes it easy to follow someone."
"I can see stuff like Twitter and Jaiku and all the other variants of micro-blogging being much more progressive," said Linhares, who hopes to get Ontario NDP Leader Howard Hampton using Jaiku and Twitter during October's provincial election.
Tech watchers like Linhares say micro-blogging is part of the evolution of social networks like Facebook and MySpace.
"We live almost tribal - it's all about staying in touch with your digital tribe on a moment-by-moment basis," said Andy Walker, technology author and co-host of the online program "Lab Rats."
Twitter brings networks like Facebook more into the present, he said.
"Facebook is much more about reconnecting to your past," he said.
