Generation Y slow to embrace Twitter

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

"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.

Gabig got the tweet 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.

There's the fact that their elders like it, and that's very uncool. That's bound to change as tech-savvy Gen Xers reach middle age and Baby Boomers and some senior citizens become more comfortable with social networking. "In some ways, what we're seeing here is a kind of closing of that generational gap as it relates to technology," says Craig Watkins, a University of Texas professor and author of the book "The Young and the Digital."

Pew researchers also found in a report released last week that the number of people ages 18 to 24 who use some type of status-update service is growing quickly, too. They attribute much of the growth to Twitter.

"So much of this is driven by community. I'd even call it a tribe," says Susannah Fox, a Pew researcher who was the new report's lead author.

She said the survey also found that wireless devices are increasingly a factor in Twitter involvement, as in the more you have -- laptop, mobile phone and so on -- the more likely you are to tweet.

Alex Lifschitz, in his third year at the Rochester Institute of Technology in New York, uses Twitter as a tight-knit circle, keeping his contacts more limited than on Facebook.

Using his cell phone or laptop, he tweets to let professors know he can't make it to class or to ask questions about assignments. He also uses it for something as basic as organizing a food run with friends on campus.

"I can simply tweet and ask who wants to go somewhere with me, and I'll have a few takers at any given time," he says.

Mallory Wood, a recent graduate of Saint Michael's College in Vermont, is another Twitter convert -- primarily for work. She's now an admissions counselor there, in charge of getting more people to follow her department on Twitter. She uses the service to offer application-fee waivers to prospective students and points them to links to student blogs, even some with complaints about campus life. "You have to be real with them," Wood says.