Hasn'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.
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.
The first time I have ever heard of Justin Bieber was by seeing his name in the trending topics for weeks in a row. (first half of the year) So a lot of Bieber fans do tweet.
I think twitter changed their trending topics algorithm to not show Justin Bieber every time, they opted for new popular topics instead of always popular topics.
The author admits that some subset of teens do tweet for specific reasons. He does not really mention whether teens follow others on twitter or not, just whether they broadcast information. I agree that most of those followers of Justin Bieber are probably teenagers, however how many are actively tweeting as well as following? I think you may be arguing a point the author wasn't trying to make. His opinions were about producing information, not consuming it.
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.
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 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.
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.
These 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.
This is a very true statement. My geek friends and I tweet all the time, but I was trying to get my girlfriend to sign up and she outright refuses. It is easier as geeks here to see the benefits of services like Twitter, but in the real world (and also in the teen world) it just isn't that important.
I 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.)
You're right. However this post gives a little more than that - an insight into social media as percieved by millenials from one of their own. Nothing new, but not entirely irrelevant.
Why is this only true of teenagers? Seems like the argument applied to most people. My parents don't tweet for pretty much the same reasons, for example.
My 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 much better.
"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.
Of course, that's what we do. But the problem is finding those people. Facebook provides a way to find your friends. A normal search on twitter will reveal 99% of spammers and 1% or real people.
Twitter is a platform built for inclusive broadcast (to everyone), and to teenagers it offers no obvious value.
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.
What do protected tweets do that a Facebook status update wouldn't? Public tweets have added value over Facebook statuses for some people, but I don't see where protected tweets would.
Defaults matter. Twitter is public by default and the whole ecosystem is based on this assumption, the private setting is just an afterthought. Sure, you can tweet privately, but then you lose most of the features, and I wouldn't rely on security of that.
These articles tilt me to no end. Who cares if teenagers don't tweet, really. My parent's don't like Kanye - so what. It certainly doesn't mean they won't ever tweet, if that's the underlying concern.
I understand why teens might not tweet, but I thought this sentence was strange:
"Teens' lives are entirely built around their actual friends. Quite simply, why would teenagers bother using Twitter when Facebook exists, and offers so much more?"
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.
