Ohhhh, Mrs, twitter ye not?
11 March 2008
Middle-aged professionals have taken the ‘youth technology’ of twittering and made it work for them.
The idea of twitter seemed a self-centred, egotistical when I first heard about it. Users can send update texts, called tweets, up to 140 characters long to a database of friends who follow your Twitter stream, or to a wider audience through the Twitter website (www.twitter.com).
It was originally developed for internal use by Oblivious in San Francisco and officially launched for wider use in 2006.
Of course, Twitter can be used as an extension of MySpace, FaceBook et al, where people, usually teenagers, are convinced that the world is interested in how many friends they have and how they are feeling at the moment.
So I was intrigued when I read about Ryan Kuder and Susan Merrit, both Yahoo employees who lost their jobs in its recent round of cutbacks, planned before Bill Gates started eyeing up the company.
The Los Angeles Times reports that both turned to Twitter to be oh-so-Californian and express their emotions about their last day at the internet portal. A cyber hug was sent out around Silicon Valley and beyond. Both Kuder and Merrit have received goodwill messages and support from around the world, with tweets from China, Japan and Europe. Naturally, with a techno-savvy database of 1.2million users visiting the website in December 2006 alone, both hope that job offers will soon be made through the contacts established through their chronicles of redundancy.
By broadcasting in an entertaining way their last days at Yahoo, Kuder who was a marketing manager at Yahoo had 400 people tracking his tweets in a single day and Merrit who was a product team leader there, got 100 responses in five hours after updating her blog, her FaceBook entry and adding a tweet to her Twitter stream.
The irony is of course, that these internet employees are now spurning the hand that used to feed them and looking beyond the power of the net to communicate and job-seek.
Twitter can undoubtedly be used for some classic teenage egotism, such as these I found: “My first yoga lesson is in one hour” and “Happy Friday”, another person’s take on it is a support group or a vague recruitment service. It is interesting that the thing here, is still to know your audience. Kuder and Merrit would have got nowhere Twittering to the above yoga followers but by taking a fresh approach and new technology they have captured Silicon Valley’s imagination, for the time being at least.
Just as text messaging was initially driven by teenagers who cottoned on to the fact that it was cheaper than a phone call, now even “crinklies” text through the day. Maybe the same will happen with Twitter. I see that both Democratic presidential candidates, Hilllary Clinton and Obama Barack, both keen to appeal to the young voter, are Twitter-ers, but 71 year old Republican John McCain is not.
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