Granny loves Facebook. And Skype. And her iPod.
New survey and statistics show older women embracing personal technology.
NEW YORK (Fortune) -- Patti McConnell is pretty much a typical Facebook user. The Calgary, Alberta, resident has been a member of the social-networking site for more than a year. She says she uses Facebook to stay in touch with friends, check out family members' pictures, and play word games such as Scramble and Twist.
Did we mention that McConnell is 61 years old? "I think it is wonderful," the computer-savvy grandmother says, though she admits she is still getting used to having the ability to peer into other people¹s personal lives. Says McConnell: "Sometimes you wonder if you're not being nosy."
Forget the stereotypes about senior women fearing technology. McConnell and peers are eagerly embracing Facebook and other high-tech solutions in a big way: According to Inside Facebook, a website devoted to tracking the social network, the fastest growing group of new U.S. users on Facebook are women 55-to-65 years old. That group, the site says, has grown 175% from September 30 to February 1, while American women overall increased about 43%.
Separately VibrantNation.com, an online site for mature women, recently asked women over the age of 50 to share their technology preferences. Of the 20,000 women who responded to the survey, 63% say they own an iPod or other MP3 player, and 30% of respondents say they use Skype, the voice-over-IP application. Some 28% of the women who responded to the opt-in survey say they use a Flip or other mini camcorder to shoot videos and upload them to the web.
"All of a sudden it seems the world is waking up to what we already know," says Carol Orsborn, a senior strategist for VibrantNation. "Women at midlife and beyond are early adopters [of technology], competitive with their kids, and in many cases, they are beating out their kids."
Stephen Reily, CEO of VibrantNation, says his site's research has found that older women tend to be big users of communications technologies -- services such as Skype and webcams that help them keep in touch with their networks of friends. "They're using technology to enhance the lives they already have, rather than filling the gap with gadgets that are a distraction, the way a teen boy might," says Reily.
The widespread use of tech among older women presents an interesting opportunity to makers and marketers of consumer electronics. Reily cites the example of one senior woman who purchased webcams and Skype services for all of her family members as a way to stay in touch.
Orsborn suggests that gadget-makers would do well to build products and services that appeal to senior women, partly because they are loyal customers but also because their needs aren't that different from the needs of the average consumer. "This is a very discerning and demanding market," she says. "If you hit a homerun with them you're going to hit a homerun with a lot of different markets. They want technology to be easy and intuitive, but that's something everyone wants."
Tuesday, March 10, 2009
San Francisco Chronicle May Survive
Deal aimed at keeping San Francisco Chronicle publishing
(CNN) -- San Francisco Chronicle has reached a tentative agreement with its largest union on contract concessions, a key step in keeping the newspaper from being sold or closed, officials announced Monday.
The Chronicle told employees last month that the paper was at risk if it did not stop bleeding millions. Its closing would leave San Francisco as the first U.S. metropolis without a major daily paper.
Members of the California Media Workers Guild, Local 39521, will vote as early as Thursday on the contract changes, the Chronicle reported Monday. Approval by a majority of union members is needed. The union negotiating committee recommended membership approval, the Chronicle reported.
Details of the agreement were not immediately available. But Hearst Corp., which owns the Chronicle, had said earlier that the paper has lost money every year since 2001, including more than $50 million last year.
Staff members at the Seattle Post-Intelligencer received similar news recently, with Hearst ownership saying the paper would be closed or turned into an Internet-only publication.
The struggles at the Chronicle and Post-Intelligencer reflect those of the newspaper industry, as readership and advertising have slumped nationwide.
Similar financial pressures caused the Detroit Free Press and Detroit News to announce in December that they would become the first major metropolitan newspapers in the United States to end daily home delivery. The owners of the Philadelphia Inquirer and Daily News filed for bankruptcy last month because of a huge debt load. And the Denver Rocky Mountain News published its last issue last month after nearly 150 years
A Parable of the EPA Talents
A man going on a journey called his servants together and entrusted his
property to them. He gave one five talents of money, another two talents,
and another one talent.
The man who had received five talents used them to take his staff to the
Evangelical Press Association convention in Indianapolis. There they learned
to understand and meet the needs of their readers, to get more out of
freelance writers and non-journalists, and to implement a new publishing
strategy that increases revenue while reducing expenses.
As a result, their business prospered. The man with two talents did likewise, and his
publication also prospered. But the man who had been given one talent just stuck it in a mayonnaise jar and buried it in his yard.
The master of the servants returned and settled accounts with them. The man
who had been given five talents was able to return 10. "Master," he said,
"We went to the EPA convention and explored new marketing ideas, and we've
prospered." The master said, "Well done, faithful servant."
The man with two talents brought his master four, saying, "The advertising
sales discussion at the EPA convention helped me boost revenue, and the
chance to network with other publishing professionals was eye-opening." And
his master said, "Well done -- come share my happiness."
But the man who had received one talent was able to return only one talent,
and it smelled slightly of mayonnaise. "Master," he said, "I was frightened
by the economic downturn and thought it would be good to dig a hole and hide
until things magically got better on their own, rather than try to improve
my skills, add to my knowledge, or strengthen my publication."
His master replied, "What's wrong with you? Have you not read the e-mails
promoting the EPA convention? Did you not visit the EPA Web site to learn
about the helpful workshops being offered this year?" The master told his
staff, "Take his readers and advertisers and give them to the others.
"For those who do not panic will find opportunities for growth, while those who
are ruled by fear will lose what little they have. And make that worthless
servant stay home in early May, weeping and gnashing his teeth rather than
joining his peers in Indianapolis for the joint convention of the
Evangelical Press Association and the Associated Church Press."
Let he who has ears, hear. And let he who has not yet registered for the
convention, register:
http://www.epassoc.org/index.php/Register2009.html
property to them. He gave one five talents of money, another two talents,
and another one talent.
The man who had received five talents used them to take his staff to the
Evangelical Press Association convention in Indianapolis. There they learned
to understand and meet the needs of their readers, to get more out of
freelance writers and non-journalists, and to implement a new publishing
strategy that increases revenue while reducing expenses.
As a result, their business prospered. The man with two talents did likewise, and his
publication also prospered. But the man who had been given one talent just stuck it in a mayonnaise jar and buried it in his yard.
The master of the servants returned and settled accounts with them. The man
who had been given five talents was able to return 10. "Master," he said,
"We went to the EPA convention and explored new marketing ideas, and we've
prospered." The master said, "Well done, faithful servant."
The man with two talents brought his master four, saying, "The advertising
sales discussion at the EPA convention helped me boost revenue, and the
chance to network with other publishing professionals was eye-opening." And
his master said, "Well done -- come share my happiness."
But the man who had received one talent was able to return only one talent,
and it smelled slightly of mayonnaise. "Master," he said, "I was frightened
by the economic downturn and thought it would be good to dig a hole and hide
until things magically got better on their own, rather than try to improve
my skills, add to my knowledge, or strengthen my publication."
His master replied, "What's wrong with you? Have you not read the e-mails
promoting the EPA convention? Did you not visit the EPA Web site to learn
about the helpful workshops being offered this year?" The master told his
staff, "Take his readers and advertisers and give them to the others.
"For those who do not panic will find opportunities for growth, while those who
are ruled by fear will lose what little they have. And make that worthless
servant stay home in early May, weeping and gnashing his teeth rather than
joining his peers in Indianapolis for the joint convention of the
Evangelical Press Association and the Associated Church Press."
Let he who has ears, hear. And let he who has not yet registered for the
convention, register:
http://www.epassoc.org/index.php/Register2009.html
Monday, March 9, 2009
Chicago Trib Features Warsaw Story
A good example of localizing a story (note citing Chicago-area persons):
From the Chicago Tribune
Indiana town thrives as orthopedic manufacturing capital'
By Tim Jones | Tribune correspondent
8:33 PM EDT, March 8, 2009
WARSAW, Ind. — These days you can't count on people to buy cars, homes and other big-ticket items, not with more than 650,000 workers getting tossed out of their jobs every month.
But you can bet a bundle on this: As long as Baby Boomers keep falling apart, the orthopedic industry, much of it residing in this unpretentious little town in northern Indiana, should keep humming along nicely.
Warsaw, which bills itself as the "orthopedic manufacturing capital of the world," is the happy exception to widening economic misery because about 6,500 busy workers—roughly half the town's population—build replacement hips and knees that, unlike cars and RVs and other items made in this region, are in big demand.
For the remainder of the story, click here.
From the Chicago Tribune
Indiana town thrives as orthopedic manufacturing capital'
By Tim Jones | Tribune correspondent
8:33 PM EDT, March 8, 2009
WARSAW, Ind. — These days you can't count on people to buy cars, homes and other big-ticket items, not with more than 650,000 workers getting tossed out of their jobs every month.
But you can bet a bundle on this: As long as Baby Boomers keep falling apart, the orthopedic industry, much of it residing in this unpretentious little town in northern Indiana, should keep humming along nicely.
Warsaw, which bills itself as the "orthopedic manufacturing capital of the world," is the happy exception to widening economic misery because about 6,500 busy workers—roughly half the town's population—build replacement hips and knees that, unlike cars and RVs and other items made in this region, are in big demand.
For the remainder of the story, click here.
Saturday, March 7, 2009
Oh, Those Vexing Gender Pronouns!
On Twitter, is it 'he or she' or 'they' or 'ip'?
By Elizabeth Landau, CNN
(CNN) -- Twitter users may value brevity in their messages, but that doesn't mean they don't think about the social implications of language.
Is this [men working] sign sexist? Some say our language should be more inclusive of both genders.
"Can't we English-speakers just agree upon a gender-neutral pronoun?" attorney Paul Easton recently Twittered. "Tired of PC grammar gymnastics."
Easton isn't alone. There have been at least 18 recent tweets about the fact that English has no grammatically correct substitutes for words like "he," "him," and "his" that do not have a gender implied.
Consider the sentence "Everyone loves his mother." The word "his" may be seen as both sexist and inaccurate, but replacing it with "his or her" seems cumbersome, and "their" is grammatically incorrect.
"I find myself spending a lot of time reworking or obsessing over sentences to avoid sexist language, and wonder why we settled on these burdensome conventions rather than popularizing a gender-neutral pronoun," Easton said in an e-mail.
It turns out that an English speaker's mind can't instantly adopt an imposed new gender-neutral system of pronouns, linguists say. A sudden change in the system of pronouns or other auxiliary words in any language is very difficult to achieve.
That's because pronouns are "function words," which connect words and phrases but do not have "content" meanings. While new nouns like "cyberspace" and verbs like "to google" become widespread fairly quickly -- and people often come up with synonyms for "cool" -- it's much more difficult to introduce or change function words. The mind just won't incorporate them.
"The function words form a closed club that resists new members," Harvard University linguist Steven Pinker writes in his book "The Language Instinct."
Proposals for gender-neutral pronouns in English began cropping up in the 19th century -- not for reasons of equality, but for the sake of grammatical correctness, said Dennis Baron, professor of English and linguistics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. More than 100 such proposals, including "thon" and "ip," have arisen, and none of them has stuck.
It wasn't until the 1970s that the issue became about equality for women, Baron said.
Today, Internet forums such as Twitter are buzzing about why English doesn't have a good substitute for "they," and what could be done about it. Transgender groups have also taken an interest in the topic -- in fact, the Trans@MIT at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has a gender-neutral pronoun system in its Allies Toolkit.
If there were a deeply felt need for gender-neutral pronouns, they would arise naturally and become widespread through popular culture rather than through an educational or governmental mandate, Baron said. But, for now, many people continue to write the phrase "him or her." iReport.com: Sneak a peek at a 'Tweetup' gathering of Twitter users
"Does it make our culture less sexist? Probably not. But it's a nice gesture," he said.
Signs of sensitivity
While everyone knows that "men at work" means "people working," studies have shown that gendered words do make a difference in how we perceive things, said Kathryn Campbell-Kibler, assistant professor of linguistics at The Ohio State University.
"If you ask children to draw 'cavemen,' they do draw cave men," she said.
The issue has public policy implications, too. In response to a complaint from a local magazine editor, the public works commissioner for Atlanta, Georgia, replaced 50 "Men Working" signs with signs that said "Workers Ahead" last year and encouraged contractors to use only the gender-neutral signs, said spokeswoman Valerie Bell-Smith. Replacing the signs cost less than $1,000 total, she said.
"There are many women who work in public works, and we want to be respectful and sensitive to the fact that they're out there, too, doing the hard construction work," she said. iReport.com: Share your 'tweeting' tips, tech obsessions
Cindy Scott Day, a writer from Granger, Indiana, who recently Twittered about gender-neutral pronouns, said words like "mailman" and "fireman" have fallen out of use, in favor of "mail carrier" and "firefighter." The "biggest dilemma" is the gender-specific pronoun (he or she) issue, she said.
The words that stay, the words that go
The pronouns "I" and "we" are some of the most ancient words, supporting the idea that function words are very resistant to change. New research from Britain suggests that these words, along with the numbers one, two, three and five, have been fairly consistent for thousands of years.
Researchers used a supercomputer to look at how words have been used throughout the centuries across the Indo-European family, which includes English, the Romance languages, the Slavic languages, and Indian tongues such as Hindi.
An obvious example of the preservation of an ancient word is "two." In Spanish it's "dos," in Slovak it's "dva," in Farsi it's "do" and in Hindi it's "do" -- all of which are strikingly similar ways of denoting the number two.
"We could time travel and have very limited conversation," said Mark Pagel, evolutionary biologist at the University of Reading in the United Kingdom, who led the study. "We really believe that we can probably go back 20,000 years with those really, really old words."
Adjectives and verbs, on the other hand, change much more rapidly. The first one to go extinct will be the adjective "dirty," which will cease to be used to mean "unclean" in 750 years, Pagel said.
Other candidates for extinction are the verbs to "turn," "push," stab," "squeeze," and "throw." "To push" will likely go out of use in 850 years, Pagel said.
That's because these words have a very high rate of change, according to the computer model. Try translating them into other Indo-European languages, and you come up with very different results. For instance, already there are 46 unrelated ways of saying "dirty" in the Indo-European languages, a clear signal that in English it will fall out of use relatively quickly.
By Elizabeth Landau, CNN
(CNN) -- Twitter users may value brevity in their messages, but that doesn't mean they don't think about the social implications of language.
Is this [men working] sign sexist? Some say our language should be more inclusive of both genders.
"Can't we English-speakers just agree upon a gender-neutral pronoun?" attorney Paul Easton recently Twittered. "Tired of PC grammar gymnastics."
Easton isn't alone. There have been at least 18 recent tweets about the fact that English has no grammatically correct substitutes for words like "he," "him," and "his" that do not have a gender implied.
Consider the sentence "Everyone loves his mother." The word "his" may be seen as both sexist and inaccurate, but replacing it with "his or her" seems cumbersome, and "their" is grammatically incorrect.
"I find myself spending a lot of time reworking or obsessing over sentences to avoid sexist language, and wonder why we settled on these burdensome conventions rather than popularizing a gender-neutral pronoun," Easton said in an e-mail.
It turns out that an English speaker's mind can't instantly adopt an imposed new gender-neutral system of pronouns, linguists say. A sudden change in the system of pronouns or other auxiliary words in any language is very difficult to achieve.
That's because pronouns are "function words," which connect words and phrases but do not have "content" meanings. While new nouns like "cyberspace" and verbs like "to google" become widespread fairly quickly -- and people often come up with synonyms for "cool" -- it's much more difficult to introduce or change function words. The mind just won't incorporate them.
"The function words form a closed club that resists new members," Harvard University linguist Steven Pinker writes in his book "The Language Instinct."
Proposals for gender-neutral pronouns in English began cropping up in the 19th century -- not for reasons of equality, but for the sake of grammatical correctness, said Dennis Baron, professor of English and linguistics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. More than 100 such proposals, including "thon" and "ip," have arisen, and none of them has stuck.
It wasn't until the 1970s that the issue became about equality for women, Baron said.
Today, Internet forums such as Twitter are buzzing about why English doesn't have a good substitute for "they," and what could be done about it. Transgender groups have also taken an interest in the topic -- in fact, the Trans@MIT at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has a gender-neutral pronoun system in its Allies Toolkit.
If there were a deeply felt need for gender-neutral pronouns, they would arise naturally and become widespread through popular culture rather than through an educational or governmental mandate, Baron said. But, for now, many people continue to write the phrase "him or her." iReport.com: Sneak a peek at a 'Tweetup' gathering of Twitter users
"Does it make our culture less sexist? Probably not. But it's a nice gesture," he said.
Signs of sensitivity
While everyone knows that "men at work" means "people working," studies have shown that gendered words do make a difference in how we perceive things, said Kathryn Campbell-Kibler, assistant professor of linguistics at The Ohio State University.
"If you ask children to draw 'cavemen,' they do draw cave men," she said.
The issue has public policy implications, too. In response to a complaint from a local magazine editor, the public works commissioner for Atlanta, Georgia, replaced 50 "Men Working" signs with signs that said "Workers Ahead" last year and encouraged contractors to use only the gender-neutral signs, said spokeswoman Valerie Bell-Smith. Replacing the signs cost less than $1,000 total, she said.
"There are many women who work in public works, and we want to be respectful and sensitive to the fact that they're out there, too, doing the hard construction work," she said. iReport.com: Share your 'tweeting' tips, tech obsessions
Cindy Scott Day, a writer from Granger, Indiana, who recently Twittered about gender-neutral pronouns, said words like "mailman" and "fireman" have fallen out of use, in favor of "mail carrier" and "firefighter." The "biggest dilemma" is the gender-specific pronoun (he or she) issue, she said.
The words that stay, the words that go
The pronouns "I" and "we" are some of the most ancient words, supporting the idea that function words are very resistant to change. New research from Britain suggests that these words, along with the numbers one, two, three and five, have been fairly consistent for thousands of years.
Researchers used a supercomputer to look at how words have been used throughout the centuries across the Indo-European family, which includes English, the Romance languages, the Slavic languages, and Indian tongues such as Hindi.
An obvious example of the preservation of an ancient word is "two." In Spanish it's "dos," in Slovak it's "dva," in Farsi it's "do" and in Hindi it's "do" -- all of which are strikingly similar ways of denoting the number two.
"We could time travel and have very limited conversation," said Mark Pagel, evolutionary biologist at the University of Reading in the United Kingdom, who led the study. "We really believe that we can probably go back 20,000 years with those really, really old words."
Adjectives and verbs, on the other hand, change much more rapidly. The first one to go extinct will be the adjective "dirty," which will cease to be used to mean "unclean" in 750 years, Pagel said.
Other candidates for extinction are the verbs to "turn," "push," stab," "squeeze," and "throw." "To push" will likely go out of use in 850 years, Pagel said.
That's because these words have a very high rate of change, according to the computer model. Try translating them into other Indo-European languages, and you come up with very different results. For instance, already there are 46 unrelated ways of saying "dirty" in the Indo-European languages, a clear signal that in English it will fall out of use relatively quickly.
Who Really Killed Rocky Mountain News?
Who Really Killed the Rocky Mountain News?
By Bob Diddlebock
"We are just deeply sorry."
That's all E.W. Scripps Co.'s Cincinnati, Ohio–based executives could mumble last week in closing Colorado's oldest company, the 150-year-old Rocky Mountain News.
In shuttering an operation sprung in 1859 from a gold-mining camp just blocks from its downtown Denver home, Scripps directly or obliquely blamed everything — the economy, the Internet, demographics — and everybody — Denver Post panjandrum William Dean Singleton, ignorant consumers, bloggers — for the diminished tabloid's demise. They certainly were factors. (See the top 10 financial collapses of 2008.)
But the black hats in this sad Western tale are the suits: the Scripps' newspaper executives whose ineptitude over the past 25 years fumbled away a prime market to a competitor they should have killed off two decades ago.
When MediaNews Group boss Singleton rode into town to buy the scarred and limping Denver Post from Times Mirror Co. for next to nothing in 1987, the Rocky was riding high, thanks to the fevered legacy of former editor Michael Balfe Howard and a band of savvy local marketers.
A wild-and-crazy guy whose grandfather had co-founded Scripps-Howard Newspapers, Howard recruited smart, aggressive talent throughout the 1970s and let it loose to dig up dirt, badger Denver's cowboy-booted establishment and raise journalistic hell. Occasional newsroom gunplay and rampant staff drug use aside, those Hunter Thompson–like efforts paid off: the Rocky topped the Post's circulation in 1980. (Read "How to Save Your Newspaper.")
But Howard's cocaine-fueled rocket fizzled, and the suits in Cincy, tired of his crazed professional and personal ways, bounced him in 1980. Though circulation climbed, eventually hitting 447,000, and advertising continued to grow, Scripps coasted.
Cincinnati got complacent, refusing or declining, for example, to administer a kill shot to the Post, such as buying it before Singleton did, while parading faceless, small-thinking editors through the newsroom and importing ad execs who couldn't or wouldn't think local.
To read the remainder of the story,click here.
Friday, March 6, 2009
What Young People Say About Social Media
From Allen Weiss. Read the original plus comments here.
What the Young People Say About Social Media
Once upon a time I wrote a weekly column for an online technology magazine. When new Internet technologies and web sites emerged, I was tasked with predicting their fate.
Whenever I said something would take long to adopt (like e-books, for example), I got tons of hate email saying a) I didn’t know what I was talking about, and that b) the upcoming generation would look at the technology completely different than we did and readily adopt it. That I didn’t know what I was talking about wasn’t surprising, but what was curious was this faith that once younger people came along, everything would change.
Well, last week I had the chance to talk to two classes of undergrads at a major university about Internet marketing. After explaining search engine optimization, web analytics, paid search, etc the subject turned to social media.
I gave them the typical talk about listening, participating, having a dialog, giving up control, etc, and how social media is a big deal (you know, the standard rap about if you’re not on a social networking site, you’re not on the internet). Then I showed them the various social networking platforms and asked them which ones they participated in.
Now, just a bit of background here. These are juniors and seniors in a business school. When you look at them, you know these are the kids who aspire to move into the business world very soon.
So, the first class told me that MySpace was considered pretty passé, and they were all on Facebook and almost all on LinkedIn. When I asked about Twitter, however, only 4 (out of 40) in the first class used it.
I immediately posted a tweet about this and heard back from several people. Matt Collier, for example wondered whether many of them had even heard of Twitter (perhaps this was about non-awareness, rather than a disinterest in using this platform).
So, during the second class I asked this question again. It turns out almost everybody had heard of Twitter, but only 1 of 40 was using it. When I asked them why they were so disinterested, they explained they got most of this experience on Facebook and didn’t see the value. Frankly, the general comment was “why would anybody waste their time on this?”
When I showed them what TweekDeck looked like, I got almost pained looks and comments about information overload (this from a generation that has grown up with information overload).
Now, some people think that when relationships and business are important, these people will flock to Twitter. Hmm. Business is important to them right now and they are obsessed with finding jobs and building relationships. So, what does this platform mean for their future?
Other people think this is about being “ahead of the curve”. But whose curve are we talking about…the curve of people who are in business right now, or the younger generation that isn’t living in the land of curves?
As many who heard me talk about this subject know, I have no proverbial dog in this fight. I’m not an evangelist of any platform, just trying to understand what is going on.
But one thing I know is that you can’t have it both ways. If you believe that looking at younger people give you an idea of what will be popular in the future, then you have to seriously consider what this group of future business people are saying about the technologies they feel are valuable to them.
So, what do you think? Well, it turns out if you're over 20 years old, what you and I think isn't relevant here. But look through a really objective lens (no evangelism, please), and what do you see for the generation about to enter the working world?
What the Young People Say About Social Media
Once upon a time I wrote a weekly column for an online technology magazine. When new Internet technologies and web sites emerged, I was tasked with predicting their fate.
Whenever I said something would take long to adopt (like e-books, for example), I got tons of hate email saying a) I didn’t know what I was talking about, and that b) the upcoming generation would look at the technology completely different than we did and readily adopt it. That I didn’t know what I was talking about wasn’t surprising, but what was curious was this faith that once younger people came along, everything would change.
Well, last week I had the chance to talk to two classes of undergrads at a major university about Internet marketing. After explaining search engine optimization, web analytics, paid search, etc the subject turned to social media.
I gave them the typical talk about listening, participating, having a dialog, giving up control, etc, and how social media is a big deal (you know, the standard rap about if you’re not on a social networking site, you’re not on the internet). Then I showed them the various social networking platforms and asked them which ones they participated in.
Now, just a bit of background here. These are juniors and seniors in a business school. When you look at them, you know these are the kids who aspire to move into the business world very soon.
So, the first class told me that MySpace was considered pretty passé, and they were all on Facebook and almost all on LinkedIn. When I asked about Twitter, however, only 4 (out of 40) in the first class used it.
I immediately posted a tweet about this and heard back from several people. Matt Collier, for example wondered whether many of them had even heard of Twitter (perhaps this was about non-awareness, rather than a disinterest in using this platform).
So, during the second class I asked this question again. It turns out almost everybody had heard of Twitter, but only 1 of 40 was using it. When I asked them why they were so disinterested, they explained they got most of this experience on Facebook and didn’t see the value. Frankly, the general comment was “why would anybody waste their time on this?”
When I showed them what TweekDeck looked like, I got almost pained looks and comments about information overload (this from a generation that has grown up with information overload).
Now, some people think that when relationships and business are important, these people will flock to Twitter. Hmm. Business is important to them right now and they are obsessed with finding jobs and building relationships. So, what does this platform mean for their future?
Other people think this is about being “ahead of the curve”. But whose curve are we talking about…the curve of people who are in business right now, or the younger generation that isn’t living in the land of curves?
As many who heard me talk about this subject know, I have no proverbial dog in this fight. I’m not an evangelist of any platform, just trying to understand what is going on.
But one thing I know is that you can’t have it both ways. If you believe that looking at younger people give you an idea of what will be popular in the future, then you have to seriously consider what this group of future business people are saying about the technologies they feel are valuable to them.
So, what do you think? Well, it turns out if you're over 20 years old, what you and I think isn't relevant here. But look through a really objective lens (no evangelism, please), and what do you see for the generation about to enter the working world?
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