Baby boomers tweet with the younger set

Baby boomers are flocking to Twitter. Though they don’t care much for MySpace and kind of like Facebook, Twitter is their thing. Twitter attracts other people, too, of course. Twitter, the fastest social network site sings your life in 140 characters.

How Twitter is different

MySpace drives people nuts and they’ve all dropped it pretty much. Too big. Too noisy. Too complicated, and too full of weirdos. FaceBook – too many quizzes and silly stuff, too ,much noise. Twitter, you drop by for 15 minutes a couple of times a day and talk with a lot of people about a lot of topics. It helps develop traffic for Webs and blogs like my DigitalGrandparent, Ontext, and WomenDaybyDay.com.

Log on to Twitter and the interface looks much like a blog – the kind done in Wordpress, for example. It’s a one column page, no frills, white background, mostly text. It says, “Twitter. what are you doing?” and then there’s a text box.

You sign up, provide a few bits of info about yourself, login and start.

Baby Boomers Tweeting at Twitter

The idea is to write a brief sentence – called a tweet – about anything on your mind. Doesn’t have to be what you’re doing. What you’re thinking works. So does what you would like to share. Some people type famous quotes. Some type ads for their web work. Some, the best ones, type things that are interesting, about themselves, their world and how they can connect to you.

You can connect with friends and family or with the entire world on Twitter. Your choice. There’s a function called follow. It’s a simple button that allows you to see what a specific user is saying all day long. Some people follow thousands of others, though for the life of me, I can’t figure out how they keep track of all that. Some follow only local people. Some just follow their family.

First You Follow

If you get into the whole process you can

• download applications that simplify the experience
• search Twitter for new people to read
• promote a project or product
• link your tweets to your blog
• learn a lot
• meet people

It’s kind of like the old simple chat rooms of 20 years ago (could it be 20 years????) on steroids. Give it a shot one of these days. Twitter will be around for a long time and is one of those things just about everyone will be doing.