Twitter is for old people

According to Nielsen, Twitter is most popular with 35-49 year olds, with teens barely rating on the Twitter popularity scale: Twitter Doesn’t Smell Like Teen Spirit .

This makes perfect sense to me for three reasons:

1. Twitter is so limited, so simple, that old people don’t feel intimidated by it. ¬†Therefore, they can get involved without fear that they are inadvertently giving away their credit card details or friend’s details. ¬†After all, a lot of TWEETERS operate under a pseudonym.
2. Twitter isn’t very interesting. ¬†Compared to Facebook, Twitter is extremely limited. ¬†Younger people embrace neo–celebrity, that is – “the celebrity of me”. ¬†In the minds of this age group, “how can you truncate my brilliance into 140 characters”?
3. It may well be that the data is skewed by the fad of Twitter – how many older people aren’t actually on it, but are hearing a lot about it at the moment, therefore answer a survey question in the positive? (Nothing against Nielsen’s excellent methodology of course!)

And now… ¬†when teachers start teaching kids about Twitter, rather than the other way around, it makes me think it’s the new Second Life, ie: not great.