Generation Y: We're just not that into Twitter

http://news.cnet.com/8301-17939_109-10265060-2.html?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-20

by peter123 • 17 years ago

10 26 17 years ago

news.cnet.com

ilamont• 17 years ago

"There isn't an obvious way to achieve a self-brand on Twitter."

Am I the only one who found this comment kind of strange?

Maybe a better question for this group: Do any "Generation Y" members here not use Twitter? Why not?

sgk284• 17 years ago

I don't. I've given it a shot twice, but it simply wasn't appealing. I guess the better question is, why should I? How does it benefit me?

stepherm• 17 years ago

I guess it depends on what you consider "using" Twitter.

Do I have an account? Yes

Do I follow anyone/post tweets? No/Rarely

Generally I use twitter search to get (somewhat) real-time information about public events.

The biggest thing stopping me from using it more is the network. I've already established my network elsewhere, most of my friends aren't on twitter, so there is little incentive to use Twitter.

cschep• 17 years ago

In the same vein, I have an account and follow people, but I check it about once a week. I just haven't found a way to extract valuable information from it. I love what Rands (http://www.randsinrepose.com/archives/2007/09/11/the_twitter...) says about it, but if I don't have a lot of followers, it can't be as useful to me. It's like you have to invest time in gaining followers first, then you can query them for information.

chairface• 17 years ago

I'm what wikipedia calls a "Cold Y" ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cold_Y_Generation ), and the only time I ever visit twitter is when someone posts a link to a particular tweet from reddit or something. It just seems like such a time investment, and there are other things I'd prefer to do.

ajdecon• 17 years ago

Not really. I post the occasional tweet (<1/day) and keep up with maybe three friends I have who only use Twitter, but the majority of my social networking is on Facebook.

I'm not impressed with the article's rationale for this, though: Twitter seems more likely to assist in creating a public "self-brand" than Facebook. Rather it seems that that people in my age group seem to like forming tighter, less public social networks. Facebook seems to be popular in my circle because status updates, photos, events, etc. are all aggregated to one place and tightly tied to a selected group of people we want to share with. My personal use-case is keeping in touch with college friends scattered across the country.

Also: most people I know have friends lists that max out in the 150-200 range, which is about what I'd expect for a personal network size. Twitter, on the other hand, seems to aim at a less personal, more public and wide-ranging network. Because of this Twitter seems a lot more useful for building a network, but Facebook is better for maintaining connections... which might be more important for the just-out-of-college crowd.

thirdusername• 17 years ago

I don't but I'm from the Swedish generation Y that grew up with social networks that was light years ahead of MySpace. I actually created an account on Twitter as a result of an discussion on HN but it wasn't at all interesting or engaging.

Personally I find twittering too short to express much of anything worth reading creating an extremely high noise to signal ratio. I'm sure it's great for people who are truly interested in what their idol is doing throughout the day but I find it verry difficult to idolize.

Twitter to me feels like a reading IRC but you only get to read one line at a time and even though there's millions of people in the room almost everyone is engaged in broadcasting instead of conversations.

Although I must say I've enjoyed using the twitter search to see what people are engaged in. It's like sitting at a cafe and just observing people, blissful entertainment.

I use Facebook though.

IsaacL2• 17 years ago

"Twitter is very popular with young people, according to reports about young people by middle-aged people" - Onion.

I have Twitter, but never use it, for the same reason I didn't have a Facebook account for a long time; very few people I know use it. I reckon it'll have taken off amongst UK university students by the end of the year, though.

I understand the comment about "self-branding", though I think that applies to younger teenagers. When I was in high school, I cared about making my MySpace profile a perfect expression of myself (without looking like I was trying to do so) - now I'm older, not so much. The comment about posting status updates to show how cool and exciting your life is rings true, but I don't think Gen Y is the only one guilty of narcissism, and we're not all that narcissistic.

In fact, I don't think the concept of "Generation Y" is a very useful one. It seems like the Boomers were very united as a generation against their parents values (at least how history seems to portray it) - us kids today, not so much. Very few people I know would define themselves as part of "Gen Y".

IsaacL2• 17 years ago

I remember finding the whole generations concept fascinating when I first heard about it, but I think this quote from the Wikipedia article sums up my misgivings about the concept :

"Britney Spears is seen publicly as the female pop icon of Generation Y[19][20][21][22], due to her enormous music career success and pop culture impact during the late 1990s to early 2000s. Eminem is also a huge voice for the Generation Y. His album "The Marshall Mathers LP" has affected many of the youths in that generation."

This is about as useful as saying "the average human has one testicle". I imagine the intersection of "people who like Britney Spears" and "people who like Eminem" is fairly small, yet you hear a lot of this kind of thing, where it's assumed that most Gen Y-ers were involved in all the trends of the 90s and 00s.

I can understand that there's certain cases where saying "x% of people born in the 1980s like y, compared to only z% born in the 1970s" can be informative. What doesn't work is when the media starts trying to amalgamate all the trends into a narcissistic, apathetic, social-network-using, ritalin-popping, blogging, twittering, hyperactive, Pokemon-playing, tech-savvy, lazy, childish, ADHD-suffering hip-hop listening, emo self-centred archetype.

amalcon• 17 years ago

I have no idea what the frig "generation" I'm supposed to be in.

I don't use Twitter because very little I find worth saying fits into the character limit. Twitter precludes any explanation or citation, so one can really only state a thesis or a single out-of-context fact. The sound-bite nature is just rather off-putting to me.

That said, I'm glad the thing exists. It seems like it probably gives people an outlet for the impulses that would otherwise lead to (for example) randomly shouting things in the streets.

code_devil• 17 years ago

I also had submitted a note regarding the difference between them a while ago ... http://socialapp.wordpress.com/2009/03/07/facebook-status-an...

mcav• 17 years ago

Most of my friends don't use Twitter. To them, Facebook is good enough. They want to broadcast status updates to their friends; their friends are on facebook; thus Twitter is redundant to them.

EDIT: Incidentally, I think that if Twitter had arrived before Facebook, it would have garnered a lot more attention from my age group.

Scriptor2• 17 years ago

I wonder how privacy on the web would have been viewed if Twitter had become popular first. With Facebook, people expect their information to only be circulated among a small group of people (though practically this has been shown to be unrealistic).

Twitter, on the other hand, seems to thrive on people posting information for the whole public to see. IIRC you have to enable privacy settings yourself. Now, did people in my age group actually want the Facebook-style privacy setup from the start, or did Facebook influence people's expectations?

imp• 17 years ago

Any references to "generations" are flawed and only serve as an easy way for journalists to make sweeping generalizations. Generation Y doesn't have anything to say in regards to Twitter or anything else.

Oompa• 17 years ago

As a "Generation Y" member that does use Twitter, I feel like my reasons should be given. Facebook is for many of my good friends, while Twitter I use to connect with a more technology-centric crowd. While a few of my good friends that aren't very tech oriented use twitter, most don't, which leads to twitter stream to be filled with more stuff that I find more interesting than my Facebook stream.

pstinnett• 17 years ago

I'm also a gen-y member and this is exactly the same way I use Twitter. I keep Facebook strictly limited to people I have met in person, face-to-face. On top of this I have most of my account locked down so that only friends I mark as "close" can see all of my information. For Twitter I don't mind following some popular developers, tech folks, etc. I also don't tweet that often - I usually just follow those that interest me.

dbrown26• 17 years ago

Twitter appeals to the 30-50 demographic because they do not have the unlimited time it takes to deal with Facebook or MySpace. I'm 33 and have a Facebook account that I rarely ever use because it just takes too much effort. I don't want to spend hours buying virtual bumper stickers, uploading photos, or any of the other myriad things that people with lots of free time do on Facebook. I use Twitter as I can and it requires no more of me. Neither is necessarily better or worse, they are designed to do different things.

Scriptor2• 17 years ago

Actually, and this maybe just be anecdotal evidence, many gen y people only use Facebook for maybe a few minutes at most each day. We get on, look for anything interesting, update status, post or reply to someone if needed, and that's it. I think only a portion of my contacts actually spend time with the more in-depth features such as managing pictures and using applications.

spoiledtechie• 17 years ago

This isn't a joke, But I thought 18-24 year olds were generation X?

abstractbill• 17 years ago

No, Generation X usually refers to people who were born between about 1960 and 1980.

bayleo• 17 years ago

It's not a permanent label for the age group... it was originally used to describe 18-24 year olds almost 20 years ago. This crap is pretty subjective but I would guess gen X is now in their mid-thirties.

thunk• 17 years ago

A lot of people are just inherently contrarian. When something crosses a certain popularity threshhold, it's disqualified -- that simple. I'm not saying that's a good thing, just that it exists. I find that I'm that way about everything except the indispensible.

Elepsis• 17 years ago

One of the biggest advantages of Twitter in my experience has been using it as a conduit for customer service. When I had an issue with checking in at a Candlewood Suites, I tweeted about it and got a response from parent company IHG. Result? My night was free (and I didn't even ask for it). Now I go out of my way to recommend IHG hotels (Holiday Inns, etc.)

That's the coolest such experience I've had thus far, but advantages like that just add a whole extra layer on top of the social networking part of Twitter for me.

grellas• 17 years ago

For average people, relentless promotional self-branding is basically absurd - it is like the twit who would rush to school to see the grades the moment they were posted - yah, you can do this, but most people would say, "get a life."

Speaking as a boomer, I would say most people like Facebook just because it provides for nice social interaction - it lets you keep up with people you want to keep up with in a non-intrusive way.

Twitter is good for specialized uses. If you have an expertise, or a strongly-typed business niche, your followers can keep up with your periodic announcements relating to your area. Since nothing meaningful can normally be communicated in 140-character chunks, tweets often are just pointers to more meaningful content. This is a non-intrusive way of pinging people for such business ends and works better than Facebook for this purpose.

I would guess Gen-Y doesn't yet have as much need for the specialized-use forum as it does for the social aspects of Facebook. Just a guess, though, since I am too far removed in age to know.

j0hnny• 17 years ago

I blame CNN, et. al.

Somehow, they manage to make it sound really important yet incredibly unhip at the same time.

steve_mobs• 17 years ago

based on current stats 60% of twitter's quit after the first month. Using the theme of the the article its probably because twitter doesn't do enough to fulfill their narcassistic needs. For instance, on facebook when they update they get comments and responses the make them feel good and make them use the service more. On twitter not so much because twitter hasn't experienced the network effect yet, where all the people's friends are not on the system and other users don't see the value in following you since you are a nobody. This means you have no followers and no one commenting on your boring life and ideas.

This explains why the people with the highest amount of followers are celebrities or famous brands. Regular people don't use it because they don't get responses back bec. no one knows who you are and why your tweets matter.

Generation Y: We're just not that into Twitter

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