Science & Technology World

hey think it's pointless, narcissistic. Some don't 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 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 "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 DeGeneres set off a frenzy on the UCSD campus
when she promised the tickets to those who, minutes of the tweet,
e-mailed her cellphone photos of themselves wearing a red towel and
standing with someone in a uniform. Gabig got the tweet, found a towel
-- and won Twitter Denial, Then Acceptance 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.