I stumbled onto this comic with a Twitter-inspired punchline. It was amusing to me. Do you get it? Just in case, I’ll translate:

• Bird 1 is happily chirping away.

• Bird 2, next to him, thinks Bird 1’s chirps are laugh-out-loud funny, so he repeats them to all his friends and characterizes them as “funny bird noises”.

• Bird 3, listening to all this, is like, “Huh?”

So I got it. But I wondered how many other people would also get it. And so I devised a totally un-scientific experiment. I asked the following group of people to tell me what the comic meant:

1. Daughter, 21, pharmacy student
2. Daughter’s friend, 25, fellow pharma-geek
3. Son, 15, King of Texting
4. Wife, let’s call her “mature”, territorial Mac user
5. Boss, also “mature”, has no patience with most social networking tools
6. IT Whiz Kid, 22, annoyingly smart

Only IT Whiz Kid got it. Everyone else was clueless about what Bird 2 was saying. Which got me thinking: Twitter is touted as being so simple to use, yet Twitter-speak is still complicated for most people.  It actually reminds me of typing DOS commands back in the day. On the other hand, text-shorthand is sort of universal at this point.  Everybody got what Bird 3 was saying. So I’m wondering if Twitter will ever catch on with the general population the way SMS has.

Just a thought …

Submitted by: Dan Giancaterino, Education Services Manager
on July 08, 2009 - 8:37 am

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