Restated, the author's argument is as follows:
-- 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.
Why Teens Don't and Won't Tweet
31–40 of 49 posts
Re: Why Teens Don't and Won't Tweet
#32I think it's foolish to take the position of spokesperson for a generation. 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 author had apparently just earned his/her 5th age bit. When you're sixteen you don't necessarily have many things about which you can speak with authority, if you wish to do that. Your peers probably come closest. (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.)
I think the seventh brings bitterness and resignation ;)
Re: Why Teens Don't and Won't Tweet
#33My own experience is that 99% of tweets are spam, which means that it is hard to find credible people using it. 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…
"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.
Re: Why Teens Don't and Won't Tweet
#34Because they're texting.
Re: Why Teens Don't and Won't Tweet
#35These type of articles seem to come from a basic assumption that non-teens do tweet.
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.
Re: Why Teens Don't and Won't Tweet
#36Hasn't the writer heard of Justin Bieber? Who does he think his 6 million followers are? I actually think Bieber might be a big reason why more and more teenagers ARE starting to tweet. I recently did interviews with High School kids and was surprised to hear how many of them used twitter.
I'd argue that the logic is flawed. Studies have shown that Twitter users in general are more narcissistic than Facebook users (although rather obviously the frequent status updaters on Facebook are more narcissistic than average users) in general.
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.
Re: Why Teens Don't and Won't Tweet
#37Earlier quoted context omitted.
Just because Justin Bieber has 6m followers, doesn't mean any of them tweet. Twitter has always been more of a 'broadcast to followers' than a conversational tool.
> 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.
A friend of mine who got on the featured users list and went from 10,000 followers to 1,000,000 followers said it was like nothing changed. The number of @replies and RTs didn't increase noticeably at all.
Re: Why Teens Don't and Won't Tweet
#38Re: Why Teens Don't and Won't Tweet
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
To answer honestly, no. I don't think I've ever heard that name before. 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 li…
It seems to me that a lot of people use it as a replacement for RSS. I'm not sure why a reader would prefer to consume a twitter feed over RSS, but evidently a lot of people do.
I don't know about others, but the fact that Twitter has a single API (as compared to RSS1 vs. RSS2 vs. Atom, etc.) is an advantage. The fact that Twitter is JSON whereas RSS is XML is also a benefit.
Re: Why Teens Don't and Won't Tweet
#40I think it's foolish to take the position of spokesperson for a generation. 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 author had apparently just earned his/her 5th age bit. When you're sixteen you don't necessarily have many things about which you can speak with authority, if you wish to do that. Your peers probably come closest. (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.)
3D? :) That is a nice metaphor.