DigitalBeat

The old fogies at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco today tried to figure out what those crazy kids are doing with technology by interviewing a group of five Bay Area teenagers. The session, moderated by former Piper Jaffray analyst Safa Rashtchy, rambled and eventually degenerated to teenagers free associating on different companies (”Google?” “Simple!”), but the most compelling part for me was seeing their visceral dislike of Twitter.

Now, the “teens don’t tweet” idea has already been beaten to death by the tech press, and Twitter co-founder Biz Stone has already told us that he isn’t too worried about it. But it’s one thing to read about surveys and studies and another to see teens on-stage, talking about how they don’t see what the point is. None of them had positive feelings about the microblogging service; a few said they had tried it out and didn’t find it useful.

“If I were using Twitter, I would just say I’m sitting on a couch in front of a bunch of people,” one teen said, and it was clear he couldn’t fathom why he would do that.

Later, one of the audience members asked if the teens might reconsider their position when they’re older and need to promote something (which, by the way, is a dispiriting way to see Twitter’s purpose). They said they might about it, if they knew enough people using the service.

This may be obvious to many of you, but I was also struck by how isolated the teens seemed from all the cool new tech that Silicon Valley nerds are excited about. None of them owned an iPhone, or any of the newer smartphones. They still used Google for all their web searches and only seemed vaguely aware of Microsoft’s search engine Bing. And while almost everyone I know uses Gmail for their personal email, one teen (a boy) declared, “Hot girls use Hotmail.”

Instead, they were really excited about Facebook. Isn’t that site kind of uncool, now that it has been around for a while, Rashtchy asked. No, the teens replied, because they still feel the site’s popularity and mainstream awareness are growing.

The kids also had good things to say about Apple. One said Apple had “won” with it’s “I’m a Mac vs. I’m a PC” television commercials, while another declared, “Windows would be a good prison guard, because it always locks up.” (As you can tell, a couple of them liked to grandstand for the audience.)

So how seriously should we take all these comments? Do they represent the future of the web? Well, maybe not — beyond the obvious caveat that these are just five teens, The New York Times has noted that many of the most popular sites on the web have become hits through an adult audience, so the importance of teens may be overstated.

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