Intellectual Property Law

Twitter's Trouble: Teens and Twenty-Somethings Turned Off

By Cynthia Brumfield

Kara Swisher makes this interesting point today: few people know what Twitter is. She attended a wedding this weekend in Washington (admittedly not the most tech-forward city in the U.S.) and out of around 30 people she queried, no one knew what Twitter is.

Everyone, however, knew about Facebook and even half the people had a Facebook. And these two informal data points underscore something I've noticed lately and that is: Teens tend to drive mass market social networking adoption and teens think Twitter is useless.

Think about it -- IM and MySpace and Facebook all emerged from teen culture and were only later adopted by the grown-up world. (Same thing with YouTube, which strictly speaking, is not a social networking platform.)

But just ask plugged-in teens and young twenty-somethings about Twitter, demonstrate it for them and they don't get the point. "Oh, it's like Facebook for old people," one seventeen year-old recently said to me as I demonstrated Twitter for her. "Why would I use it?" she asked. She gets text messages sent to her cell phone whenever someone posts a message on her Facebook wall, her phone vibrates all day long with SMS messages, her IM is alive with constant pings when she's online and her Last.FM communications thing-a-ma-bob supplies a steady stream of communications. And on and on and on.

From what I can tell, hardcore Twitter users are the tech elite, mostly A-list bloggers, and increasingly marketers looking to reach this elusive audience. That's a fairly narrow (albeit critically important) slice of the world.

The real question is whether the wellspring of mass social networking, namely teens, college students and recent college graduates, will adopt Twitter once they, um, grow up. If not, Twitter is likely to remain an important although niche social networking service that will probably never reach the mass adoption curve of, say, Facebook or IM.

Full post as published by IP Democracy on April 28, 2008 (boomark / email).