Photo Credit: guitargoa
I’ve been reading a lot of news recently about the fact that teens and young adults aren’t using Twitter or blogging as much as the 25+ crowd. Â First of all, I don’t see why it’s a big deal.
I remember when I was a teenager I was still developing my personality and setting my goals for myself. I was also very concerned about what I made myself look like. Yes, I’m saying that I cared about what people thought of me. I didn’t have the experience yet to know that I was happy with who I was because I was still developing myself.
Let’s look at the nature of the two services.
Twitter is basically an open service by default. The world can see your tweets if you don’t lock down your account. For a teenager, this can be somewhat scary because unintended friends and possibly parents can see the updates. The only privacy setting for Twitter is making your tweets private. But at that same time there is extra work to be done by wading through any follow requests you get and at this point being only one of a handful of your friends using the service.
Blogging tends to be more personal until you tie your job experience to it. Also, outside of your friendspace I remember being a lot more closed about myself. Half the time I wasn’t even sure what I was doing was something that my friends would think was ‘cool’.
Obviously I’ve outgrown most of that. The remaining feelings of doubt are there because of professional reasons. Will this post get me fired? Will my friends feel their privacy invaded over this post? These are a few of the questions that I ask myself when I have an idea for writing something personal.
Obviously there are exceptions to the rule. There always are exceptions. However it seems that as of now the popular communication styles for teens are for Facebook (lots of privacy settings), text messages (single destination), and instant messaging (single destination).
What would be an interesting metric would be the number of teens that save their IM conversation, Facebook, or SMS history. That would allow for a little more insight into how private they want to be.
Another idea is the number of teens that check into Foursquare, GoWalla, Yelp, and other location based notification services. I’m willing to assume that the percentage for those services with teens is around the same level as Twitter and blogs.
What are your thoughts?
–dez