business

Esthela Gonzalez's friends are talking to her, but she's not listening.

The chatter is coming at Gonzalez not over a cup of coffee, but through her iPhone, on Twitter. Gonzalez, bored by some of her friends' blabbering, has quietly put a few of them on the social networking equivalent of timeout. Using a $4.99 iPhone application called Twittelator Pro, the 36-year-old from Chantilly, Va., simply tapped a button that says "mute" and, voila, her friends' tweets are blocked. Best of all, they're totally oblivious that they have just been silenced.

"When I saw this feature, it was like a choir of angels coming out to greet me," Gonzalez said.

The age of social media has made it easier than ever to stay connected with the people you know, but it has also made it almost inevitable that users will come to feel overwhelmed by interruptions, updates and status reports. So now, the technology that turned people into 24/7 communicators has spawned a tool kit that discreetly lets users be just a tad antisocial on their own networks.

This is the digital equivalent of walking down a back hallway to avoid the talkative colleague who's always boasting about his latest sale. With more than 500 million people connected on Facebook, 190 million on Twitter and zillions more scattered on other social networks around the world, users are embracing new ways to politely ignore friends and family, just as they do in the analog world.

"The problem with one big water cooler is that you don't always want to be at the water cooler with everyone all the time," said Bretton MacLean, a Toronto developer of a popular iPhone app called TweetAgora, which lets users block unwanted tweets without the tweeter knowing. As the company puts it, "Some people are great in real life but just plain suck at Twitter."

Programmers such as MacLean say they are racing to meet user demand for discreet ways to avoid people technologically. Besides muting on Twitter, other emerging services include Ex-Blocker, created by Web design firm Jess3, which blocks social networking posts from ex-girlfriends and -boyfriends and other undesirables.

Avoidr, developed by a San Francisco techie, promises to "keep your friends close and your enemies at that bar down the street." The service uses information from Foursquare, the social network on which users share their location with friends, to tell people which establishments to avoid to dodge someone who has moved to their zero list.

Those seeking a more exclusive world than Facebook can instantly start private social networks using The Fridge. "All fridges are private," the company says. "Invite only. Safe from the parents, boss, or those pesky stalkers."

How can people claim to be guilt-free about cutting off their friends? Experts in the social dynamics of the new media say those who use avoidance technologies are simply being human in ways that social network creators didn't foresee when they built these supercharged ways to connect family, friends, friends of friends, and friends of friends of friends.

"When these social networks came along, the founding premise seemed to be to just connect everyone," said Duncan Watts, director of the Human Social Dynamics Group at Yahoo. "My first reaction: Why would anyone think that's a good idea? We spend a lot of time making sure everyone doesn't know everything, and now we are collectively bumping up against this issue of people wanting to avoid people."

Just about everyone -- users, programmers, big thinkers -- agrees that the new avoidance services require a certain amount of deception, but they argue that these tools, and more subtle ones that will be developed down the road, are needed to avoid hurt feelings and are essentially no different from pretending to need a freshened-up drink to escape from boring cocktail party chatter.