As you may of read on my website before, I don’t get Twitter. I mean, I have it (http://twitter.com/thisismyurl/) and I’ve programmed my blog to update it but honestly, I simply don’t get it, nor … do I care to get it. Actually, everything about it seems pointless to me from the cute little status updates to peoples self promotional content.

I will admit it, I simply don’t get Twitter. I think I’m too old (35) to get it so today while guest lecturing a class in business to 25 high school students, all armed with mobile phones, iPhones, Blackberries and most Facebooking during the lecture I asked for a show of hands.

“How many of you have Facebook?” I asked knowingly and was actually surprised when one girl didn’t put up her hand. Even the teacher had it.

“How many of you use YouTube?” I next queried. Everybody again raised their hand.

“How many have seen Plenty of Fish?” I asked. One overly energetic youth volunteered. “How many have seen it but not used it?”, again most hands went up. Finally … I was ready for the big question, the one that would help me bridge the boring business lecture into something awesome, something that would let me tap into the spinal cord of the next generation and finally ask the question that I was dying to ask …

“How many of you have Twitter?”

Silence.

Worse than silence in fact, one girl asked me what was Twitter? It was like I’d asked how many bauds their modem was. Complete, unadulterated, unconnected, uninvolved, uninterested silence.

It was like the room came to a stand still, like there was a traffic accident but a boring one at the front of the room. Even the teacher looked puzzled. I tried to recover, go onto the next part of my prepared speech but then it happened, some kid that looked like he should have been in Fast Times at Ridgemount High spoke up, “I think my mom has Twitter”. This of course caused another student to blurt out that he’d Twittered your mom and of course it set off a chain of more open, more honest but equally confused questions and what Twitter was and why they should care about it.

After I explained Twitter by describing it as a social media micro blogging platform, the looked confused. Then I explained it was like Facebook’s status updates but without the rest, simple a place where you could update your status in short sentences and people could see what you’re up to … this led to the best question about Twitter I think I’ve ever heard from one girl in the class, “So Twitter’s for stalking me?”.

btw, I’m not the first to discover this …

• http://www.cringely.com/2009/06/teens-dont-twitter/
• http://www.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,1910425,00.html
• http://blog.nielsen.com/nielsenwire/online_mobile/teens-dont-tweet-twitters-growth-not-fueled-by-youth/
• http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&sid=aG2UIb23pNQ0
• http://mashable.com/2009/08/05/why-teens-dont-tweet/