To Tweet or Not to Tweet

The other day I was watching a commercial for Kirstie Alley's Big Life... ok then later I watched the show. The point is the show was about her Twitter addiction. Again last night I was watching Chelsea Lately and her and Taraji P. Henson were talking about how they were reluctant to Twitter and first and now they love it. These moments in my life of pop culture brought me back to something that I have been thinking a lot lately: Why is that so many of the people I know my age are afraid of Twitter? Wow now I need to ask why this sounds like a Sex and the City?

I could count on probably 1 hand the number of people who are my friends and are actually active on Twitter. I know that Twitter is not a phenomenon of the young (<24 years old), and 35+ has been what has driven the platform, but 25-34 is fairly high indexing. Plus I have never really been a first adopter of technology amongst my friends. Twitter would probably be the first time, and not just because it was my job. Why do people seem to be so afraid?

I have been asking a lot of people in the age group in question (perhaps because it relates to my job), and the answer to "Why not Twitter?" seems to be that people do not need to know everything about their life. "I'm at the grocery store." "I'm chewing gum." "I'm dumping the body."

Really people? Are you not more creative than that? This is not Foursquare we are talking about (BTW do not get me started on getting my friends involved in that). You're not afraid of status updates on Facebook. Pretty similar. More importantly I use Twitter & my addiction to TweetDeck to keep me up to date with everything in the world that I am interested in. Little bits of info and news just blip on my screen like a stock ticker, ready for me to interact. I read, I share, I take the meal deal at the restaurant nearby, while planning for the hot concert that is happening later that night.

It seems like Kirstie, Taraji, & Chelsea have discovered all of this joy and information. Not sure what is up with my friends, but maybe soon they will grow up ;)