I am in a frenzy of late and would hate for my tenure application to go through the various approval committees and then have someone say “Ah, twitter? what a waste of time. that platform is gone!”

Btw, who/what got you on twitter?

I think the one word answer is hype. One day I woke up, pulled up Google Reader and saw that almost every single tech related blog I subscribe to was going on about twitter. So I signed up.

Ah, LUKE, perhaps you are too young to not see it as an age thing. Some of the interesting comments about Plurk, since you mentioned it, is that it is “twitter for teens”. Just like everything in society, Web 2.0 does create prejudices and stereotypes according to age. It doesn’t outrightly promote ageism, but contributes to it because of its users (or lack of users, as in my friends).

I do strongly agree with you that you can bring a horse to water but can’t make it drink. Only 1 student from my twitter experiment still tweets in Italian now that the semester is over. The other 19, not at all. Also, my friends think my research is “interesting” but very few of them have actually created an account or even read my blog (hmmm….maybe I should drop them )

There have been many posts recently about how these social sites are self-perpetuating (used by technology enthusiasts, touted by them as the second coming) and then remain trapped by not making it into the common market. The question always becomes, well, then, how effective are these tools if the user pool is so limited? And of course, how many different renditions of the same product can we actually have until they are all deemed useless?

People tune you out? I can’t believe that…not you! Welcome to the club, I guess. Yes, the power of our peers very often exceeds the power of those in the know. Btw, who/what got you on twitter?

Ever since Twitter came out, I have been trying to get my brother (4 years younger) and my cousin (2 years older) into it. I send them invitations every once in a while and mention it often, but they just don’t seem to be interested at all. They are more into Facebook and/or Myspace and that’s where they have their “communities”. In fact, my cousin only joined Facebook last year or so - after it was open to general public for a while and built critical mass of contacts.

Here is an interesting case study - a Polish Facebook clone nasza-klasa.pl is extremely popular amongst the 40+ crowd for some reason. Several of my family members (aunts, uncles, etc..) were on that network long before I joined it, and those who were not, were talking about it. That network seems to have built a critical mass of members in that age group and suddenly became very attractive to them - allowing older people rekindle old high-school friendships, find former co-workers and etc. They are not using it to keep track of their kids, but rather to build their own social networks, share pictures and etc.

Why parents you talked about don’t care about Myspace? I guess they don’t see it’s value - they view it primarily as something that kids do. And joining a service overrun by horny teenagers is probably not something that really appeals to them.

Just as Twitter which is mostly populated by technology enthusiasts, geeks, bloggers and various online personalities sharing byte sized chunks of information in real time does not appeal to “normal” people like my students, or my family. Perhaps not until it reaches a critical mass of some sort.

You see, no one is going to listen to me and join the social service I like. I’m a geek and I get excited about all kinds of online stuff that is absolutely irrelevant to most people. So they tune out my ravings about Twitter just as they tune me out when I talk about Linux, open source, ruby on rails or web standards. If I like it, it must be some cryptic geeky stuff.

However if they find about it from their friends or coworkers, they will be much more receptive.

I was reading a post this morning that described plurk as “whacked-out”…