Grudgingly, young people finally flock to Twitter

CHICAGO — They think it's pointless, narcissistic. Some don't even know what it is.

Even so, more young adults and teens — normally at the cutting edge of technology — are finally coming around to Twitter, using it for class or work, monitoring the minutiae of celebrities' lives.

It's not always love at first tweet, though. Many of them are doing it grudgingly, perhaps because a friend pressures them or a teacher or boss makes them try the 140-character microblogging site.

"I still find no point to using it. I'm the type of person who likes to talk to someone," says Austyn Gabig, a sophomore at the University of California, San Diego, who only joined Twitter this month because she heard Ellen DeGeneres was going to use tweets as a way to win tickets to her talk show.

DeGeneres set off a frenzy on the UCSD campus when she promised the tickets to those who, within 15 minutes of the tweet, e-mailed her cell phone photos of themselves wearing a red towel and standing with someone in a uniform.

Gabig got the tweet, found a towel — and won tickets.

She might think she won't tweet again, but social networking expert David Silver predicts she'll change her mind.

"Every semester, Twitter is the one technology that students are most resistant to," says Silver, a media studies professor at the University of San Francisco, where he regularly teaches a class on how to use various Internet applications. "But it's also the one they end up using the most."

It is a rare instance, he and others say, of young people adopting an Internet application after many of their older counterparts have already done so.

Their slowness to warm to Twitter comes in part from a fondness for the ease and directness of text messaging and other social networking services that most of their friends already use.

Many also are under the false impression that their Twitter pages have to be public, which is unappealing to a generation that's had privacy drilled into them.

Then there's the fact that their elders like it, and that's very uncool. But that's bound to change as tech-savvy Gen Xers reach middle age and baby boomers and even some senior citizens become more comfortable with social networking.