I hated the idea of twitter for a long time because I thought it was the shitty part of facebook (incessant updates from people whom I don't care about) x 10, because it's just a feed.

But since I started really getting into it last year, I've become so much more knowledgeable by following the best entrepreneurs, VCs, anyone with interesting insight. It's a surprisingly pure channel of news/knowledge if you use it correctly and not go on a follow spree.

It's definitely not the place for social networking as far as communicating with friends/family goes.

I've been a Twitter user since 2006 and mostly just use it to post sarcastic and pretentious remarks for my own enjoyment; the social aspect of it is almost meaningless to me. Many of my friends in tech do have Twitter accounts, of which they make varying degrees of use (though I'm not sure how many of them would regard it as essential - probably not many).

Most of my non-tech friends in real life broadly do not have Twitter accounts, or if they do, they follow about eight people (usually including Stephen Fry) and have either never tweeted, or only tweeted about four times, usually starting with, "Well, I'm on Twitter now. What do I do next?"

I'm talking about people in their 20s and 30s here. The same set of people do make a lot of use of Facebook (though a few, like me, find it vastly irritating and have deleted their accounts in recent years - but I'm not sure I know anyone female in that age bracket who doesn't have and use a Facebook account).

A bit more anecdata while I'm at it: Instagram seems pretty popular in cities, where people enjoy posting pictures of their pulled pork burgers and cocktails in jam jars - out here in the countryside, I don't hear much about it. The younger generation definitely do use Snapchat and the like, but I think most people over about 25 have no understanding at all of it. WhatsApp seems to have a very broad and universal appeal, and is a real common denominator for anyone who falls under the category of "I want to keep in contact with a friend who lives abroad" (I don't fully understand how it won out over Skype, apart from Skype being a very poor experience on mobile). Lastly, I'm not sure I know anyone who doesn't work in online media who actually uses Pinterest.

Excellent survey! The part i liked most was where you didn't even mention Google Plus :).

The fact I completely forgot about it is probably quite telling!

Considering Twitter is still the first go-to social platform for reactions to news, I doubt it.

Nonetheless, I've had trouble convincing my parents why they should use Twitter.

Being a big sports fan (#phinsup) I find that I get breaking news first on Twitter. Player signings, coaches being hired (#dancampbell) and fired (#firephilbin), etc. I also find a lot of interesting links on Twitter, that are things I wouldn't necessarily have found otherwise, because they're from sites that weren't necessarily always on my radar.

Do you get mostly opinions and reactions on Twitter or 140char reporting on breaking stories? I tried using it to follow the Arab spring and just couldn't.

Wish I could find it, but a couple weeks ago I saw someone posting a 20-ish part message on Twitter. At some point you've gotta think maybe this isn't the appropriate way to use the service.

@pmarca is famous for his multipart "tweet storms". Lots of others have followed suit (not sure if he started the trend, but was the first one I saw doing it).

At first when it appeared I thought it was silly but now I like it since it's a quick simple way to get information without all the bloat. I never thought I'd like it, now I look forward to new technologies that don't exist yet but I think I will need when they arrive.

I have ditched Facebook that's a cesspool of humanity and HR magnet.

Same here. I just don't see the value in Twitter when I can easily get personalized content from Facebook's news feed and use an RSS reader for the sites that I follow.

Now imagine you're yourself, but you don't know what an RSS feed is, like 99.9% of the population. Doesn't Twitter sound useful?

I see it used most heavily for, like, customer support... Surprised that's not a more core part of their business

Even just setting up a Twitter account for a business feels like it's not something they've put any effort into. You can set up an advertising account with multiple users, but for a regular public-facing Twitter account it's either use TweetDeck or share passwords.

Yep. It sounds like a real, viable market too. They probably have a lot more insight into this than me, it's just something that surprises me as an external party

Really? For who? That's super interesting

I agree with @bpicolo when it comes to support. If you have a problem with most of the big companies in terms of support and they are delaying a response, all you have to do is reach out to the support team on Twitter and they respond ASAP.

Companies such as AT& T, Chase, Citi, Bank of America, Amazon etc..

AT&T is truly the shittiest company I've ever dealt with. Maybe I should try the magic of Twitter...

@Bachmeier, I agree. And oh, they are right there with Comcast in my opinion when it comes to bad service. They are very good at making small mistakes like overcharging you know on a bill. So Twitter will do wonders for you :).