

Teens Don’t Twitter - ableal
http://www.cringely.com/2009/06/teens-dont-twitter/

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telegraph
"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).

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Adam503
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.

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aardvarkious
"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)

~~~
Jem
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!

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russell
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.

~~~
buugs
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.

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Scriptor
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.

~~~
buugs
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.

~~~
derefr
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.

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

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

~~~
TomOfTTB
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?

~~~
zmimon
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.

~~~
zimbabwe
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.

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rjurney
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.

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derefr
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>

~~~
rjurney
Very good point.

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thesethings
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.

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Oompa
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.

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erlanger
I don't know anybody under 29 who twitters.

~~~
ivankirigin
now you do

