Words Dept.: entry

The internet webosphere has been awash since Tuesday with the astonishing revelation that a 15-year-old boy and his friends don’t use Twitter. Since this apparently proves that teenagers don’t use Twitter, perhaps it’s time for a breakdown of who does use Twitter. (Yes, it’s another of those cantankerous lists that will offend almost everyone at least once, including myself.)

Within each of these categories, you can assume that the individual Twitterer is between 25 and 49 years old and has a full time job. As such, it’s unclear how they have the time to permanently frequent what is basically a chat room for old farts.

1. The famous person

Most famous people have several thousand followers but only follow a handful back. The reason for this is ostensibly because they fear stalkers but is really because they think they are better than “normals” like us. The exception is Stephen Fry, who tries to follow all his followers back. He even follows me, despite the fact that I stopped following him some time ago after I got bored with his tweets about African wildlife and being stuck in a lift.

2. The “social media specialist”

As many as 91% of all people on Twitter talk about nothing except Twitter*. These people, who are often men with trendy beards, are bafflingly popular on Twitter. This is mainly because they were among the first people to “get” it. As such, when everyone else finally “got” it between October 2008 and March 2009, these people already had 900 followers and, like the popular kids at secondary school, were able to attract more. They apply hashtags to everything and often say “haz” instead of “have” because this is how people on the internet speak. LOL!

3. The weird semi-stalker/spammer

Beware of people who have 46 followers but are following 1,289. The sort of people who live in places like “Sacramento, CA” and mention “Zen” or “life-coaching” in their profile. There is no explanation for what these semi-stalkers want. (Most people don’t block them because even though they say they don’t care about their own follower numbers, secretly they are happy to have lots of apparently harmless people bumping up their stats.) Spammers are similar to the semi-stalkers, in that nobody knows what they want. The difference is they use a grainy avatar that looks like Britney Spears doing something unusual with a carrot.

4. The PR consultant

Twitter is a godsend for PRs because it allows them to bolt half-arsed “web strategies” on to otherwise lacklustre campaigns, which they (correctly) assume will impress their clients. Many PR people pretend they are being conversational about something new they have discovered (a “funky new ironing board!”, a “revolutionary new tampon!”, etc) when in fact they are “creating online conversations” about something they are being paid to “create online conversations” about.

5. The relentless cross-poster

Since most people have nothing interesting to say in their daily lives, it’s understandable that most people on Twitter can’t think of much interesting to say either. Consequently, they set up some kind of automated service that aggregates lots of other stuff (blog posts, bookmarks and general web waffle) and churns it out incomprehensibly, with odd sets of brackets, dots and bit.ly addresses to the annoyance of the entire world. It’s the equivalent of walking into a room and yelling “Page 41 of the Guardian G2 section!”, then reading out the first sixteen words from the headline and intro before walking off. Then doing the same thing again five minutes later with page 42.

6. The person who thinks you give a toss about their record collection

We’ve all been to a house party where someone hogs the record player and plays dreary music, failing to notice that everyone else in the room lost interest in the Bluetones after that one single they did that was quite good in about 1994. The online equivalent is the Twitter link to the Spotify/Blip FM playlist.

7. Some lunatic at a conference

There’s always someone on Twitter who’s at a conference that’s demarcated purely by a hashtag, an apparently random series of lower-case letters and “09″. In fact, up to 97% of these conferences* are about social media and/or “online engagement”, presumably because these are the only types of conference where the chairman considers it acceptable for delegates to sit typing stuff into a mobile phone like a pig-ignorant teenager while somebody important is on stage doing a carefully crafted presentation. They then tweet stuff from the unmissable #xmklwfdf09 conference every five minutes for six hours, AS THOUGH THEY ARE WITNESSING THE BLOODY OBAMA INAUGURATION. Clearly, they aren’t.

Considering all of the above, is it any surprise that 15-year-olds have found much better things to do with their time?

*All figures are made up