There is an etiquette to away talk. No direct insults. No sex talk.

Meaghan Colley, who will be a freshman at Old Dominion University this fall, says you're also not supposed to steal other peoples' messages. She searches the Web for riddles or quotes that convey the mood she's in. She's happiest when she makes up her own message. One day, exhausted from three different jobs, she wrote, "Going to work is like eating your favorite food. Too much is awesome for a while but then you just get sick of it."

Once they are wired into a college's Internet, away from parental controls, young people often step up their use of away messages, changing them three, four, even 25 or 30 times a day. A host of Web sites has sprung up over the last couple of years to assist, offering sayings, jokes and icons.

Two students at Wake Forest University in North Carolina devised a way to make reading messages easier. Under the current system, a user can only read one away message at a time, a function that requires three clicks. Nick Gray and Ryan Farley devised a service that allows a viewer, with three clicks, to see all his away messages at one time.

They named their service BuddyGopher and posted 20 fliers in the school's freshman dorms. "Within four days we had 500 kids signed up," Gray recalls. This is not surprising, perhaps since, according to his research, more than 90 percent of Wake Forest freshmen use away messages. Now offered around the world, BuddyGopher serves 13,000 users and the number is growing.

Gray checks his away messages constantly. Last Wednesday night, the messages ranged from sweet ("Actually watching poker with my dad") to full-of-oneselfness or possibly irony ("Tentative efforts lead to tentative outcomes. Therefore give yourself fully to your endeavors. Decide to construct your character through excellent actions.") Thankfully, the next writer was more succinct: "My head hurts."

Writing away messages can take time. "It's the new self-conscious thing," Tanguay admits. "Sometimes I put up something I think is witty, and my friends say it wasn't. It's one more thing to worry about."

Even worse is putting up an away message and hearing nothing from anyone.

Sometimes you want to take a break for several days, Lalangas says. She adds, "I can't imagine doing that."

Michael Barnett, who'll be a junior at GW, can. He doesn't IM or AM.

"Away messages are annoying," he says. "They're the newest stage of having no privacy. I'm not sure what purpose it serves, to let people know what you're thinking."

He confesses he's out of the loop on this. Telling someone his age that he doesn't use the latest tools to communicate "is like telling someone you don't breathe," he says.

So what happens when Barnett's wired colleagues move into the workplace and eventually set up a family life? Howard Rheingold, author of "The Virtual Community" and other books, says it isn't clear.

"Ten years from now, 15-year-olds will be 25," he says. "There will be more of a connection among them and more of a difference between them and their elders. We're looking at the beginning of something."