Kristen Nagy, an 18-year-old from Sparta, sends and receives 500 text messages a day. But she never uses Twitter, even though it publishes similar snippets of conversations and observations.
“I just think it’s weird and I don’t feel like everyone needs to know what I’m doing every second of my life,” she said.
Her reluctance to use Twitter, a feeling shared by others in her age group, has not doomed the microblogging service. Just 11% of its users are aged 12 to 17, according to comScore. Instead, Twitter’s unparalleled explosion in popularity has been driven by a decidedly older group.
Though teenagers fueled the early growth of social networks, today they account for 14% of MySpace’s users and only 9% of Facebook’s. As the web grows up, so do its users, and for many analysts, Twitter’s success represents a new model for internet success. The notion that kids are essential to a new technology’s success has proved to be largely a myth.
Adults have driven the growth of many perennially popular web services. YouTube attracted young adults and then senior citizens before teenagers piled on. Blogger’s early user base was adults and LinkedIn has built a successful social network with professionals as its target.
Twitter did not attract the young trendsetters at the outset. Its growth has instead come from adults who might not have used other social sites before Twitter, said Jeremiah Owyang, an industry analyst studying social media. “Adults are just catching up to what teens have been doing for years,” he said.
One reason teenagers don’t use Twitter is that their lives revolve around their friends. Also, the public nature of Twitter is sensitive for under-18s, whether because they want to hide what they are doing from their parents or because parents restrict their interaction with strangers on the web.