Twitter: all the kids aren't doing it, but does it matter?

I myself am 20 years old and am addicted to Twitter. I would not shed a tear if it never caught on with young people. iTs bAD eNuFf i haV 2 r33D dis 5H1t 0n FaC3b00K

What is the point of twitter. So people can read about each others boring lives? It's a great tool if say you are following updates from a journal, blog, a release schedule but other than that it is pointless.

There is no point in trying to make younger people use twitter. Most of the ways that twitter is being used is more appealing to slightly older people and this is not bad. How young should you be to be allowed to use match.com? I don't see a failing business model there. When these so called young people become older they'll eventually embrace twitter, or maybe some of them will.

I can understand why someone needs an email account in this day and age but twitter is different. It is not an official form of communication, but more on the lines of an informal but formally used service. Even when companies announce important subjects to customers on twitter, there is always a longer and more detailed announcement outside twitter in a short URL. The thing is that twitter is good for short quick subjects but not for everything (like targeted email and online official statements).

In conclusion, people who do use twitter this way are demographically older and younger people will become older sometime in the future. The media has always had a negative take on subjects that are new because writers are usually trying to make the story interesting. Both social networks like facebook and myspace where believed to sizzle at a point and blogging was considered an amateurish act. Even email was subject to media skepticism. Although these various services were targeted at different demographic groups, they ended up becoming ubiquitous services.

I'm not one bit surprised. I've explained it to a few of my fellow < 18yro friends, and each one said that it sounds stupid or dumb.
Personally, I only follow people that interest me (and things like @cnnbrk, of course). People on Twitter seem to only complain if it's serious (e.g. hospital). Facebook is full of "cleaning... fml =[" and other ultimately uninteresting, boring, crap. (Also: quizzes. I don't care one bit about which roller coaster best fits you or how well someone knows pointless facts about someone else.) And if someone does post something boring and personal on Twitter, it takes five seconds to read the 140 characters and then you ignore it.

On another note, search on Twitter for "lol". There's constantly a surprisingly high number of results.

Wow?

I know so many people under 24 who use twitter. That's dumb.

11 - couldn't have put it better. Twitter is for those people who adore what they see on t.v and internet. And who also like these people? p.r companies as well as advertisers.

I heard somewhere that almost half or third of new users/posts are the only posts. i.e. after they try it, it gets boring. Twitter is not facebook, it won't hold ur attention/make you come back.

Celebrities only dig it because they "connect" to fans, when really there must be another angle. i.e. P.R telling them it will help there image, etc etc.

All in all, for the most of us, twitter is a website where u create an account, only to read posts of others and hardly post yours.

You are absolutely right. But my question is...why do all these NEWS stations have twitter? They are the NEWS! what do they put on twitter? the same thing that they talk about on the television, and on their own official websites. Makes no sense as to why regular folk use twitter it has no advantage. Now if you were to try and sell yourself (i.e marketing something, yourself, your music), then yes it is understandable. But listening to my brother-in-law obsess about how Quest Love from the roots has over 8000 twitters...I told him who gives a f*ck? the guy is a drummer with millions he has all day to twitter to his twits..and yes at the end of the day..people who subscribe are just simply virtual followers, beckoning and crying for their hero's next 140 character statement

omg ppl, do you not see the benefits of twitter? Look at the news in the past months and see what role twitter has played in it. Some ppl have said they like it bc of @cnn well...CNN has been getting some of its news from twitter. When the Iran uprising was going on (still going on?) and our cameras were not there to get it, and Irans cameras are certainly not going to post violence, who was posting them, TWITTER USERS. Twitter is just one of the social programs revolutionizing how we transmit data.

And lets face it, why do we watch basketball or go to concerts or movies. Entertainment. Twitter can also be more entertainment. People like Shaq and Ashton Kutcher have propelled twitter into a new light of movie stars with more interesting lives than our own. i r 1337

I am an intern for CKR Interactive (ckrinteractive.com) and I use Twitter. Being 20 not many of my peers are using the site. For businesses it can reach a large range of people and keep them updated and informed, therefore making it a great tool. Because of the lack of teens and youth on the site though, businesses have to be aware of who they are speaking to, since it is most likely older people with careers.
Michelle Chun-Hoon
CKR Interactive Intern
CKRinteractive.com

The "bandwagon" phenomenon is in full effect here. I personally hate Twitter with the passion of a hundred thousand burning suns for a variety of reasons.. namely...: It's a PR/media-driven orgy of yet more useless "status updates" for all of the brainless friend-addicts (you know the kind) whose daily life consists of seeking the web 2.0 driven approval of others via 11-point font; it enables the sheep of our world to indulge in their obsessions with the rich and the famous, and better follow their iconic leaders off of whatever cliff is tweeted to them that day; it is just another media-propagated trend which gives Nick, Jim, and Latoya something to chat about at the water cooler and thus "connect" them because they are obviously all three "twitter-savvy" and thus part of this year's social elite; and from a slighly paranoid military intel perspective, its not only pointless to tweet your daily life, it's pathetic, sad, desparate, and downright dangerous if you don't know who's reading. And chances are, you don't.

Twitter, I hate you, I hate the word "tweet", and I die a little inside everytime I think about all of the hollow fools in the world who think that Tweeting their boring lives has magically transformed them into some sort of new-age social savvant.

There are different uses for Twitter (more than these 4)...

1) the facebook/myspace personal style users (tweet about their daily life events)

2) the business that use it to connect to their customers (fast, simple broadcast to anyone listening)

3) networking professionals connecting with other professionals (tweeting about their industry)

4) celebrities and their fans

I personally hate #1. I don't follow any personal friends on twitter, unless they also fit #3. I follow several companies because of #2. I enjoy the fact that I don't need to go to their websites or get email from them to keep up to date with what they are doing.

#3 is what Twitter is all about. I am an architect and there is a constant amount of new technology emerging weekly. I use Twitter as a micro-blog with a built in comments section. I tweet about new technologies, processes, etc that I discover in my working environment. I have been able to connect to many other architects and engineers through Twitter that I would have never even stumbled upon anywhere else. The way I did this is by searching Twitter for keywords like #BIM, #architecture, #revit, etc. The search function is the most powerful part of Twitter imo.