Yesterday Kristen spoke about Ivy Bean, an 104 year old lady who is apparently an avid Twitter user.

The story was picked up in the UK by The Daily Telegraph and The Sun and then repeated through The Next Web.

Unfortunately, this was just a pre-arranged PR campaign and most people, including myself, didn’t realise this. However today TechCrunch explained the rest of the story.

The picture which was circulated a few days ago can be seen below :

The picture which everyone didn’t see was this one :

The guy in the picture is Martin Dix from Geek Squad, which is the company behind this PR stunt. When I checked out Ivy’s profile the other day what I didn’t notice was that her first tweet was on May 14th, the very day before her story was in all the British newspapers. I’d like to believe that if I had saw that I would have put two and two together and realise that this was a PR stunt but alas, hindsight is a wonderful thing!

Just goes to show how a simple PR setup like this can grow arms and legs when you mention the word ‘Twitter’!!!

Link : The REAL story behind the 104-Year-Old who joined Twitter

My grandparents are just now getting accustomed to email. And my parents are sometimes iffy about text messaging. But Ivy Bean is 104 years old, and is an avid user of Twitter. She already has over 10,000 followers.

As Twitter begins to take over many of the functions used for emailing, instant messaging and blogging, it’s certain that this now mainstream tool will have a quickly growing user base from the more mature demographic. So is its device-bridging capabilities the perfect medium for gaining on the older generation?

Twitter is a pretty simple tool to use, especially when you’re using Twitter for basic communication or keeping in touch with a few key people, such as family members. So perhaps Twitter is the ideal medium for such communication, despite the slower adoption of certain technology from the mature demographic. But the fastest growing demographic on Facebook is from this particular demographic. So why couldn’t it happen on Twitter as well?

Now, Ivy Bean was already pretty tech savvy when she joined Twitter. Having already created a Facebook account, Ivy was adept at social networking and readily uses it to keep in touch with family and friends. But perhaps Twitter could become an even more welcoming introduction to social media for the older demographic.

The concept of Twitter, however, isn’t always easily grasped, especially by those (of any age) that haven’t tried it out yet. Many often say that the true value of Twitter comes not from basic communication but in marketing and online brand-building. I think, to a certain extent, this is an overstatement–one that Ivy Bean is beginning to prove wrong.

And Twitter is actually layering in even more features to enhance the communication capabilities of Twitter, making it a more inherently useful tool. As more features are added onto Twitter, the more useful it could become to a broader set of users. I think geo-data could be important for Twitter in this regard. Microsoft Vine is currently testing an update system with integrated geo-data features to be used for alerts within a preexisting community.

But I think Microsoft’s introduction of such technology gives geo-data a real chance to become widely accepted as a controllable factor in social media and intercommunication practices. Twitter may be able to take advantage of the growing acceptance of geo-data and integrate it into its own service in order to generate revenue and appeal to even more mainstream (and older) users.

Though a great deal of Twitter’s value comes in the form of marketing potential for personal or business brands, it’s also important to remember the core principle of Twitter is to merely communicate with others. And that’s something we all do at any age.

This past week has been kind of rough for Twitter, as the microblogging platform attempted to improve the system around @replies. Prior to the changes, users could view @replies between followers and those they follow, as well as the @replies from those they follow, even if they’re directed at someone else. This gave a decent amount of filter control for items showing up in Twitter streams, and enabled users to see multiple angles of a given Twitter conversation.

The importance of being able to see these different angles around Twitter correspondence between two or more people is that it also allowed for some level of user-discovery. Think of it as the ability to jump into a conversation that’s going on with a person you know, and their friend. Now you have an opportunity to introduce yourself into the conversation and make a new friend.

But Twitter has been tweaking the @replies in the past few days, causing an uproar, a full-scale Twitter revolt including a dedicated site, and a prompt repeal of the changed features on Twitter. A series of blog posts on Twitter explained the changes and the reasoning behind these changes, but in the end, Twitter is still looking to further modify the way @replies work. For the time being, a temporary fix has been put in place–only mutual friends (followers & folowees) can see an @reply posted by a Twitter user when the actual “Reply” button has been utilized. A tweet that has a mention (@username) and was created without using the “Reply” button will still be seen by all followers.

Whew!

So why are things so complicated? The @reply and the newly modified @username systems are confusing, and more importantly, they’re not fluid. As the most basic level, they work for their respective purposes. But utilizing these systems for meaningful conversation, complete with context and easy correspondence, is quite a task on Twitter. The popular microblogging platform is begining to overtake some of the activity we’re seeing in traditional blogs, instant messenger clients and email, so the necessity for fluid conversation is increasing exponentially on a daily basis.

To that end, there are a couple of things going on. Third party developers have been more forward-moving in their ability to provide additional context around a given conversation, though this is still a difficult task for the developer community, given Twitter’s own limitations. Additionally, Twitter has been ramping up the amount of new features its introducing to users, as the site has seen a great deal of growth in the past six months a lone and has officially become a mainstream product with mainstream expectations from investors and users alike.

A major missing key to Twitter is the ability to have a comprehensive conversation with one or more Twitter users, especially in the public forum of Twitter streams as opposed to direct messages. The the faster Twitter can figure out a way to retrofit its existing systems to work with our existing schema around web-based and mobile communication, the better we’ll all be.