Jane & John

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 or at Five Guys but on Twitter, through her iPhone. 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 simply tapped a button that says "mute" and, voila, her friends' tweets are blocked. Best of all, they're totally oblivious to the fact that they've been silenced.

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

If John follows Jane on Twitter, John sees everything Jane writes, even if John couldn't care less about Jane's endless posts on "American Idol." This could leave John needlessly annoyed by Jane, a discontent that could seep into their otherwise healthy face-to-face relationship. The same goes for Facebook: John and Jane might be decent friends, but does Jane really care about John's pictures of his new deck?

John's and Jane's options, if they don't want to go hunting around Twitter and Facebook to figure out complicated privacy settings, have until now been dire: Just about the only way to rid themselves of a torrent of annoying posts was to drop each other from their friend lists. But in the face-to-face world, John and Jane would never drop each other over such trivial annoyances. Rather, if John knew Jane always wanted to talk about "Idol" over lunch in the cafeteria on Thursdays, he would simply avoid her table on those days. The new services seek to re-create that easy, unhurtful form of avoidance online.

"This is all really a question about how to best be polite online," said Danah Boyd, a social media scholar at Microsoft Research New England. "This etiquette is just starting to evolve. People are trying to find new ways to appear friendly when they don't really like what you're saying at all."

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