• by Bobby , November 12, 2010

I never really gave Twitter a shot, but I think it might be catching on with college students. Besides my own 2-week trial period that ended with me vowing to stick to Facebook, I don’t have much experience with Twitter.

In fact, most of my exposure to Twitter comes from watching SportsCenter because athletes (Chad Ochocinco) feel the need to Tweet everything. I was resistant at first because these “news updates” seemed so unofficial, but we all got used to it eventually.

The shocker came last week. It didn’t take long for me to label Twitter as “professional media” rather than social media because my friends didn’t use it. But for the first time, I saw students using it regularly.

I walked into my Business Communications class about 15 minutes early, as usual. Everyone else showed up within the next 10 minutes except one girl.

Our professor started class on time because he has learned not to wait on this particular person.

But about thirty seconds into his lecture, the missing girl’s friend raised her hand and said that her friend would not be able to make it. So, the next question would be, “Why not?”

Well, she was having a bad hair day. And it must have been really bad if it was depressing enough to keep her in bed all day.

The best part—her friend only knew this because she followed her on Twitter. She looked at her cell phone and saw something along the lines of:

Not going to class today. Bad hair day.

Am I proud to be part of the generation that is able to find a correlation between those two things? No. But the fact that the girl was able to let her professor know why she wasn’t going to be there without actually trying to notify him is almost impressive.

Once I see Twitter used for less obnoxious purposes, I will be a fan. But still, I see potential with this generation.