New research suggests that more young adults and teens -- normally at the cutting edge of technology, but initially slow to adopt Twitter -- are finally coming around to the micro-blogging service, using it for school, work, or simply to monitor the minutiae of celebrities' lives.

It's not always love at first tweet, though. Many of them are doing it grudgingly, perhaps because a friend pressured them or a teacher or boss made them try the 140-characters-at-a-time web service.

"I still find no point to using it. I'm the type of person who likes to talk to someone," says Austyn Gabig, a sophomore at the University of California, San Diego, who only joined Twitter this month because she heard Ellen DeGeneres was going to use tweets as a way to win tickets to her talk show.

DeGeneres set off a frenzy on the UCSD campus when she promised the tickets to those who, within 15 minutes of the tweet, eMailed her cell phone photos of themselves wearing a red towel and standing with someone in a uniform.

Gabig got the tweet, found a towel--and won tickets.

She might think she won't tweet again, but social networking expert David Silver predicts she'll change her mind.

"Every semester, Twitter is the one technology that students are most resistant to," says Silver, a media studies professor at the University of San Francisco, where he regularly teaches a class on how to use various internet applications. "But it's also the one they end up using the most."

It is a rare instance, he and others say, of young people adopting an internet application after many of their older counterparts have already done so.

Their slowness to warm to Twitter comes in part from a fondness for the ease and directness of text messaging and other social-networking services that most of their friends already use.

Many also are under the false impression that their Twitter pages have to be public, which is unappealing to a generation that's had privacy drilled into them.

Then there's the fact that their elders like it, and that's very uncool. But that's bound to change as tech-savvy Gen Xers reach middle age and baby boomers and even some senior citizens become more comfortable with social networking.

"In some ways, what we're seeing here is a kind of closing of that generational gap as it relates to technology," says Craig Watkins, a University of Texas professor and author of the book "The Young and the Digital."

Consider, for instance, that the median age of a Facebook user is now 33, despite the social-networking site's roots as a college hangout, according to the Pew Internet & American Life Project. The median age for Twitter is 31.

And while Facebook's audience is aging, Twitterers are getting younger. Internet tracker comScore Inc. found that 18- to 24-year-olds made up 18 percent of unique visitors to Twitter in September, compared with 11 percent a year earlier.