

Why kids and teens use FB and Myspace but not Twitter - jeremyliew
http://lsvp.wordpress.com/2009/03/15/more-insights-on-facebook-twitter-and-myspace-from-danah-boyd/

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unalone
We teens are paradoxical creatures. We like private little circles, but in
those circles we strut as much as possible.

A teen wants to be seen and noticed by all the right people. Sometimes that's
friends, sometimes it's crushes. They need to control that audience, so that
the wrong people don't see things, and so that they know how best to talk to
people. Think of it like the cliques in school.

Facebook gives me people I know. MySpace gives me people I know. When I talk,
I'm talking to people that I have a relationship with. That means I can talk
differently, talk more directly and more emphatically. On Twitter anybody can
listen, and that's a bad thing.

(It's still a bad comparison, though. Facebook creates a network with photos
and videos and conversations and statuses and messages. Twitter only has
statuses. The biggest draw of Facebook is its extensive, localized feature
set.)

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uuilly
You make some great points. But twitter does allow you to control who sees
your feeds. That said it's not a standard way to use their service.

~~~
unalone
But the "private" Twitter account doesn't offer as much flexibility as
Facebook's multilayered options. Does it? Can you change specific tweets to
fit for specific groups of people? (I don't have an account anymore so I don't
know.)

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anateus
I think a large part in that teens already have strong texting networks.

One of the reason twitter works is because subscribe-and-publish communication
has low transaction costs per message.

Teens engage in signaling behavior that has the high transaction costs of
communication as an element of "conspicuous consumption".

I have totally no data to back this up, but research into this area is one of
my interests, and am looking forward to performing some in the future and
seeing if my conjectures hold up.

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kyochan
Because teens do not have the right amount of self-importance required for
Twitter until college.

That's how I started.

