Why Teens Don't and Won't Tweet
readwriteweb.com
readwriteweb.com
Twitter has always been more of a 'broadcast to followers' than a conversational tool.
Can you substantiate this in any way? This doesn't match my experiences using twitter at all.
Given that teenagers are in general the most narcissistic group of all humans - seemingly by biological specialization - that they should be the biggest tweeters.
I believe the reason teens aren't bigger twitterers is because they're not being exposed to it. Online membership is a rather passive recruiting method, it's not like boy scouts where there's someone coming into your classroom trying to get you to join. Teens will have to find twitter largely on their own, which if Twitter isn't advertising to teens it means it largely won't be found until it goes viral in schools like MySpace did in its day, notably another very narcissistic site.
Teens in more affluent areas, with better phones and messaging plans are likely more twitter users simply by virtue of better access.
Perhaps not coincidentally, I don't understand why anybody would use Twitter. I mean, I certainly understand why you'd post stuff to Twitter. I just can't imagine why anybody would ever read anything that had been posted there.
As far as I can tell, it's a huge population of people shouting to promote themselves. If there were actually anybody listening, that might be useful. But I don't think anybody actually is. Or at least I can't imagine a personality type who would do so.
It's great for getting news from people you find interesting (let it be Paul Graham, Tim O'Reilly, a creator of language you like). Also, many projects announce new releases on twitter (ruby's twitter gem for instance http://twitter.com/#!/gem). Best of all: you know all these updates are short.
Besides you can favorite/RT items you think are interesting for later retrieval (using delicious to save twits is an alternative, but a cumbersome one).
On the sending side, it is good if you are one of such interesting people, and whish to keep people updated. Setting up forums/google groups just to give notice of a new release is too much of a overhead when you have twitter.
These are the information retrieval and useful aspects of Twitter, and are useful even if you have no friends/colleagues.
There is also the social one, which you people make of it as they want, like a sms broacast for setting up dinners with friends. If you have enough followers, you can use it effectively to ask for information. You can use it to ask people short questions, and engage in quick conversations with people that would not otherwise answer an email.
There are many other uses. In a nutshell: twitter is what you make of it.
1) Interesting links/insight, if I see someone posting good stuff on HN I might follow them on twitter.
2) Keeping track of events in the tech/startup sector, there's nothing that even comes close to twitter in terms of allowing you to keep an eye on what's going on
3) Staying in touch with people you meet at conferences, etc.
If you're a business then Twitter gives you an invaluable source of feedback, people might not complain to you when they get frustrated by your product but they may well complain on their twitter. It's also a great source for customer leads.
There's a gap between both MSM and the blogosphere and reality here. The blogosphere is attracted to Twitter since it likes new technology and constant self promotion. MSM is like the parents of a teen, trying to relate to their world and hanging to some band name etc they picked up.
In reality, Twitter plays a much smaller part in people's lives than it does in ReadWriteWeb or CNN.
Talk about yourself and your own group of friends by all means, but don't speak for everyone your age. It's not realistically possible to speak for the majority without a lot of research.
(The fifth bit is the one that turns black and white into shades of grey. The sixth bit will bring colors. I don't know about the seventh bit yet.)
-- Twitter is a subset of Facebook for the purpose of communicating with real life friends. Facebook does the job better, too.
-- For other purposes, Twitter gains in value, but not a lot.
For example, in technology the few people that have something to say are lost in the flood of spammers. By the way, I don't think that using twitter as a ping service for sites such as HN is helping the matter.
In Facebook at least you can rely on your real life connections, so the level of signal/noise is much better.
why don't you just only follow accounts on twitter that don't spam their followers? I agree that there is a lot of spam, but most of that shows up when you search for a trending topic/hashtag. Those trending topics usually get popular (obtaining 'trend' status) before the spammers take over.
The author does not seem to realise that the Protected tweets feature is an option that obviates those objections, and makes Twitter function in the "circle of friends" manner the author desires.
Since when have all of a teens' (or anyone's) Facebook "Friends" corresponded to real "Friends". Oh, I know some are, but really, most are not.