Teens Don’t Twitter | Hacker News Reader

Teens Don’t Twitter

cringely.com

30 pointsableal24 comments

"Since texting is usually a binary activity (the texter sends a text for every text they receive) we can guess that Echo writes about 7,000 text messages per month"

A huge oversimplification and probably inaccurate. Especially since most phones made in the past few years have the capability to send a text to multiple recipients, I highly doubt that Echo is typing as many texts as she receives -- both because she's more likely to get mass texts, and because she may herself be sending mass texts (which are charged as multiple texts, but are only typed once). I haven't been a teenager recently, but I also suspect that there is a lot more one sided texting than you'd expect (especially directed at pretty, popular girls).

Portland Trail Blazers head coach Nate McMillan was having a hrd time reaching the many very young players on his roster (NBA's 2nd youngest) on a regular basis until an experiment with trying to text his players got back almost instantaneous responses. Now he texts first when he wants to reach one of his players quickly.

"An adult or a teen celebrity might twitter but most regular kids see what they are communicating as too private to share with anyone other than the person for whom it is intended, much less any old creep who chooses to subscribe."

That doesn't jive with me- just look at wall postings on facebook (I'm a youth worker, so I have 100+ teens on my friends list- it is amazing the details that they post for anyone, including old aunt Agnes, to read)

Agreed. My partner is an IT technician at a school. His friends list has a lot of ex/current pupils & some of the things he sees published make me blush!

Echo, the girl profiled in the post, sends and receives 14,000 messages a month. 29 messages per waking hour. My fingers would be worn down to nubbins.

It seems to be an average for teenage girls, when I was in high school thats what I saw but now they have outlawed cellphones in the public schools here, probably just for that reason.

Outlawed as in banned by the school? I know the technical policy for my high school was that we had to leave them in our lockers. Of course, nobody actually did that. It was entertaining to see teachers catch students though.

As in banned, if you are seen with a cell phone on campus it is taken away and brought to the office for your parents to pick up the first time, second offense it stays in the office for a month and 3rd for a year, at least at my brothers school it is that way.

In reality, though, your parents could always come and pick it up. If they weren't allowed to, it would be theft. I just imagine that after the first offense they don't bother calling your parents, and just expect your shame to prevail over asking them to bail it out.

No the super douche parent move would be to simply buy your little brat kid another phone and forget about the old one.

Nowadays teens conduct entire relationships via SMS.

They should have provided a mean characters-per-message stat alongside that (or just skipped messages/hour and went straight for characters/hour). Typing 160 characters in each of those 29 messages (77chrs/minute) is a lot different than a standard "hi", "how r u", "gud u?", ":D"

Teens don't twitter because they are in constant contact with other teens, especially through texting.

I'd like to see some actual numbers on all this because I don't think most people Twitter. You hear all these wild numbers about how twitter is growing and growing but that's just people who visit it. I visit it to check on a few people but I'd never use it.

More to the point, in my actual life I know no one who Twitters (or tweets, or whatever). But I do know tons of people who have tried and given up on it.

So is it possible that, as a percentage of society, almost none of us Twitter?

Same here. As far as I can tell most of the hype about Twitter is driven by the fact that the people most in control of the popular tech media (slowly expanding to media generally) are also the ones who benefit most from Twitter's success. So every single publicity whore tech blogger is out there evangelizing twitter precisely because they see it as a way to drive people to their blogs where they can make money through ads.

We still have almost no evidence as far as I can tell that Twitter is being adopted as a widespread general communication tool. That's not to say that it won't, just that what we see now is still 90% hype driven and it's anybody's guess whether the thing will collapse or not when the hype dies down. For communication among my friends I still vastly prefer instant messaging which has so many features that twitter and SMS don't that using twitter feels like returning to the stone age.

It's the same with many of these big niche products. Nothing wrong with niche, but the people who call FriendFeed the wave of the future are the people who have the most to benefit from FriendFeed's becoming huge.

Twitter is miniature compared to many of the huge networks out there. Bebo, Hi5, Orkut are all huger than Twitter, last I checked. (EDIT: I checked after posting this and Twitter's past all of them globally according to Alexa, but not in terms of users.) I don't go out of my way to analyze Facebook, but I know that a Facebook fan page having a million followers is fairly routine, even for relatively minor fan pages. Getting followers on Facebook is much easier than it is on Twitter, and it gives you the exact same relationship with your audience, but even stronger because there's comment/photo/video support.

I don't mind Twitter at all - I wish more web sites would be so elegant - but a lot of the hype about Twitter being the "next big thing" is only half true. It's the NBT in that it succinctly represents a lot of the coolest things about the Internet, but it's not the only site to do that and it's one of the smaller examples out there.

When teens text, they are transmitting secrets. "I like billy. Will you ask him if he likes me?" If they weren't secrets, they would twitter them, put them on myspace or facebook, etc.

When adults tweet, they are making public statements.

That is why twitter is not popular with teens: they already make public statements on facebook/myspace, they don't mind the clutter there, and they have no interest in another platform to make public statements.

In time, teens may begin to make their public statements on twitter, because network communities are intensely fashion driven, but as twitter is content oriented - and teens are lite on good content - I doubt it will be as popular for them. Teens like flare.

If twitter had more flare, teens might like it more. But the rest of us would not.

I'm assuming that by "making public statements", you mean "showing off." (Not that that's a bad thing; it's also known as "signaling." [1]) The people teens are concerned about showing off to are always in physical proximity to them; they don't need an out-of-band channel for this. Adults are much more physically disconnected from the people they seek to impress. This encourages things like Twitter.

[1] http://www.overcomingbias.com/category/signaling

Very good point.

Many teens twitter. (and I'm sure many teens don't.)

In general i think age is become a less and less meaningful way of identifying somebody (Other sub-cultures describe people a bit better), so I feel a bit funny having this conversation either way.

One of the main concepts of the article was pretty right on, that if you're talking about private stuff like what boy you have a crush on, Twitter's not a good place to do it (for adults either), but "Teens Don't Twitter" is a really bad title for that. It should be called "Teens don't send private messages in places where others can see it."

I mean, how does his thesis reconcile with how teens undeniably use Facebook/Myspace? The teen in question is so busy texting that she can't use Twitter? (But can use other sites just fine?)

Part of me just wants to give up on even responding to the weakness of the premise.

But I want to get this out there: Teens use Twitter. I've learned this from YouTube, where I'm in a lot of mixed (age) communities centered around topics that have nothing to do with age, and people of all ages talk about their Twitter handles all the time.

In fact, it's through YouTube that I've discovered that Twitter is very diverse not just with age, but with ethnicity, disability and all sorts of things. YouTube is one of the most diverse social sites I've ever been a part of, and I see lots of YouTube <-> Twitter mingling and integration done by users.

So yeah, teens are on Twitter, as well as lots of folks that are not your standard members of cubicle nation.

As I said in the last article like this (Gen-Y doesn't Twitter), most teens won't twitter, that's fine. Texting or facebook statuses are enough for most. But for those of us looking for a more technological crowd, Twitter is fantastic.

I text between my closer friends, look at Facebook statuses of many of the friends I have, even if they're a bit distant (like my old high school friends), and Twitter to connect with the technological community around me.

I don't know anybody under 29 who twitters.

now you do

I was busy upmodding ivankirigin's comment when I realized I'm still 28, and have been on Twitter for over a year.

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