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 for three reasons:
- 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.
- 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”?
- 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.
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