Ivy Bean: putting 103 years into 140 characters
We’ve already raved about Geriatric1927... but he’s a spring chicken compared to our new favourite Silver Surfer.
According to today’s Sun, Ivy Bean has become the UK’s oldest known Twitter user after getting bored with her Facebook profile (on which she had accumulated 4,800 friends). At 103, she is also trying to get her friends in Hillside Manor care home to sign up and start tweeting too, proving that age is no barrier when it comes to tech. Here she is, pictured, with the Geek Squad representative who helped her with her Twitter account.
It makes me think of my dad, who still can’t send a coherent text message – he was a latecomer to the mobile market and found his first phone tricky to use, and the technology advanced so quickly that he just never caught up. But social networking is different, and rather than bombarding us with new features, sites are distilling the things we want into ever simpler functions.
For example, Facebook allowed us to share pictures, music, messages and a whole load of sometimes-nonsensical apps. Now, Twitter just boils your life down to a bite-sized 140 characters. Flickr takes care of your photos with no other fuss. What could be simpler than that? You don’t even need to be a member of the digital generation to work it out.
So, we ought not to be shocked that Ivy is becoming a Twitter whizz. We are, however, a bit surprised that she appears to have a soft spot for American Idol contestant Adam Lambert...