Twitter going mainstream

Mainstream among young adults, mostly, according to the Pew Internet & American Life Project (teens off the study's radar, but they microblog in other ways). Twitter, the most popular service for microblogging or status updating, and other such "have been avidly embraced by young adults," Pew says - nearly a fifth (19%) of US 18-to-24-year-olds and a full 20% of 25-to-34-year-olds now use such services to send "short updates about themselves, their lives, their whereabouts ... moods," personal, professional, national, and international news. Citizen journalism is a key component of microblogging online. But what seems to be the No. 1 attraction is that Twitter is "an inconspicuous way of staying in touch with the passions, obsessions of your friends, colleagues, and experts," as described by author and professor Howard Rheingold in this "Why does microblogging matter" slide show. Pew adds that Twitter use is "highly intertwined" with blogging and social networking, and its users are a very mobile bunch, accessing the social Net a lot from mobile wireless devices. And "mobile" is the operative word for teens, for whom texting = microblogging. Meanwhile, as for mobile social networking, the number of people who access MySpace by phone has quadrupled in the past year to 20 million, the service's CEO Chris de Wolfe said in a keynote at Europe's mobile industry trade show last week, InformationWeek reports. [See also "A (digital) return to village life?"]

The costs of communicative families

For a reality check on the cost of being highly communicative families, check out a column by Larry Magid, my co-director at ConnectSafely.org, in the San Jose Mercury News. It's so great that Apple lowered the cost of an iPhone by $200 (to $199), but then AT&T "raised the price of the data plan for the new iPhone by $10 a month, which more than wipes out the savings" from the hardware, Larry points out. And that's the point exactly: Look at the cost of service for all our household communication devices and technologies all told, and try not to choke. Just talking on the phone costs the highly communicative Magid family "$3,720 a year," not including "extras like international calls or when we go over our allotted cell phone minutes." Then there's Internet service, PC security services, cable TV, TiVo or Netflix, Xbox Live, etc., etc. Larry and I were just talking about what this must look like in other parts of the world - wondering if anybody has calculated how many families in third-world countries could be fed for the amount of money racked up by Net-literate, highly connected US families.

Canadians' digital connections

They're "fast becoming a culture of technological chatterboxes," the Toronto Star reports. A recent national survey of nearly 1,100 Canadians by Angus Reid Strategies found that only 18% of people in Canada do not own a cellphone but, at the other end of the spectrum, 18% couldn't live without their mobile phone. As for email, 64% check it at least daily, and 31% "can't resist the temptation" to check email hourly. Forty percent "couldn't contemplate life without the Internet"; and 52% say Google "has made their life better"; 55% visit Web sites at least once a day; and 22% of all Canadians (and 41% of 18-to-35-year-old ones) visit social networking sites daily (25% of women "believe these networks strengthen their sense of community with others). Social-networking sites are most popular in the Atlantic provinces, the Star adds.