Generation Y: We're just not that into Twitter
news.cnet.com
news.cnet.com
EDIT: Incidentally, I think that if Twitter had arrived before Facebook, it would have garnered a lot more attention from my age group.
Twitter, on the other hand, seems to thrive on people posting information for the whole public to see. IIRC you have to enable privacy settings yourself. Now, did people in my age group actually want the Facebook-style privacy setup from the start, or did Facebook influence people's expectations?
Speaking as a boomer, I would say most people like Facebook just because it provides for nice social interaction - it lets you keep up with people you want to keep up with in a non-intrusive way.
Twitter is good for specialized uses. If you have an expertise, or a strongly-typed business niche, your followers can keep up with your periodic announcements relating to your area. Since nothing meaningful can normally be communicated in 140-character chunks, tweets often are just pointers to more meaningful content. This is a non-intrusive way of pinging people for such business ends and works better than Facebook for this purpose.
I would guess Gen-Y doesn't yet have as much need for the specialized-use forum as it does for the social aspects of Facebook. Just a guess, though, since I am too far removed in age to know.
That's the coolest such experience I've had thus far, but advantages like that just add a whole extra layer on top of the social networking part of Twitter for me.
Somehow, they manage to make it sound really important yet incredibly unhip at the same time.
Am I the only one who found this comment kind of strange?
Maybe a better question for this group: Do any "Generation Y" members here not use Twitter? Why not?
Do I have an account? Yes
Do I follow anyone/post tweets? No/Rarely
Generally I use twitter search to get (somewhat) real-time information about public events.
The biggest thing stopping me from using it more is the network. I've already established my network elsewhere, most of my friends aren't on twitter, so there is little incentive to use Twitter.
I'm not impressed with the article's rationale for this, though: Twitter seems more likely to assist in creating a public "self-brand" than Facebook. Rather it seems that that people in my age group seem to like forming tighter, less public social networks. Facebook seems to be popular in my circle because status updates, photos, events, etc. are all aggregated to one place and tightly tied to a selected group of people we want to share with. My personal use-case is keeping in touch with college friends scattered across the country.
Also: most people I know have friends lists that max out in the 150-200 range, which is about what I'd expect for a personal network size. Twitter, on the other hand, seems to aim at a less personal, more public and wide-ranging network. Because of this Twitter seems a lot more useful for building a network, but Facebook is better for maintaining connections... which might be more important for the just-out-of-college crowd.
Personally I find twittering too short to express much of anything worth reading creating an extremely high noise to signal ratio. I'm sure it's great for people who are truly interested in what their idol is doing throughout the day but I find it verry difficult to idolize.
Twitter to me feels like a reading IRC but you only get to read one line at a time and even though there's millions of people in the room almost everyone is engaged in broadcasting instead of conversations.
Although I must say I've enjoyed using the twitter search to see what people are engaged in. It's like sitting at a cafe and just observing people, blissful entertainment.
I use Facebook though.
I have Twitter, but never use it, for the same reason I didn't have a Facebook account for a long time; very few people I know use it. I reckon it'll have taken off amongst UK university students by the end of the year, though.
I understand the comment about "self-branding", though I think that applies to younger teenagers. When I was in high school, I cared about making my MySpace profile a perfect expression of myself (without looking like I was trying to do so) - now I'm older, not so much. The comment about posting status updates to show how cool and exciting your life is rings true, but I don't think Gen Y is the only one guilty of narcissism, and we're not all that narcissistic.
In fact, I don't think the concept of "Generation Y" is a very useful one. It seems like the Boomers were very united as a generation against their parents values (at least how history seems to portray it) - us kids today, not so much. Very few people I know would define themselves as part of "Gen Y".
"Britney Spears is seen publicly as the female pop icon of Generation Y[19][20][21][22], due to her enormous music career success and pop culture impact during the late 1990s to early 2000s. Eminem is also a huge voice for the Generation Y. His album "The Marshall Mathers LP" has affected many of the youths in that generation."
This is about as useful as saying "the average human has one testicle". I imagine the intersection of "people who like Britney Spears" and "people who like Eminem" is fairly small, yet you hear a lot of this kind of thing, where it's assumed that most Gen Y-ers were involved in all the trends of the 90s and 00s.
I can understand that there's certain cases where saying "x% of people born in the 1980s like y, compared to only z% born in the 1970s" can be informative. What doesn't work is when the media starts trying to amalgamate all the trends into a narcissistic, apathetic, social-network-using, ritalin-popping, blogging, twittering, hyperactive, Pokemon-playing, tech-savvy, lazy, childish, ADHD-suffering hip-hop listening, emo self-centred archetype.
I don't use Twitter because very little I find worth saying fits into the character limit. Twitter precludes any explanation or citation, so one can really only state a thesis or a single out-of-context fact. The sound-bite nature is just rather off-putting to me.
That said, I'm glad the thing exists. It seems like it probably gives people an outlet for the impulses that would otherwise lead to (for example) randomly shouting things in the streets.
This explains why the people with the highest amount of followers are celebrities or famous brands. Regular people don't use it because they don't get responses back bec. no one knows who you are and why your tweets matter.