What If Teens Prefer Twitter to Facebook?

Do you want to make a statement but have weak or non-existent evidence to back it up? Do you want to present wishful thinking as a fact? Do you want to make generalizations from anecdotal evidence? Why not phrase your statement as a question? Who can blame you for lacking evidence when you are merely asking a question?

Only three years ago we were hearing how twitter was doomed because teens don't tweet! [1][2]

On the other hand, while I'm not a teen (by a long shot), I do find facebook more restrictive in terms of the things I feel I can say. Somehow twitter is more anonymous, despite being more public. On facebook I get the impression that people are more likely to pay attention to my ramblings.

[1] http://techcrunch.com/2009/08/30/why-dont-teens-tweet-we-ask... [2] http://blog.nielsen.com/nielsenwire/online_mobile/teens-dont...

That is an interesting question and I can see a couple of reasons why that could happen.

It's "SMS" + links + pictures + video

Now that isn't in itself a reason why they wouldn't choose FB when they got to a little older but it's sure something for Twitter to think about IMO.

The trend is obvious: the next big thing is going to be a message exchange platform where you're limited to 20 characters, but you can see everyone's messages as they type them. And all of them at once. And you can actually change other people's message as they type them. :-)

I think lots of people have made this argument in the past three years. Very similar transitions from Friendster to MySpace, MySpace to Facebook. The cool place to be moves on, but I'm not sure it necessarily will affect Facebook's bottom line

Younger people flock to systems which are the easiest to setup and use. Facebook has a larger moat than twitter especially with regard to the default settings vs Twitter.

Young people that use Twitter as a messaging platform blow my mind. How many more scandals will it take before they they realize that replies are public tweets?