

What If Teens Prefer Twitter to Facebook? - msabalau
http://adage.com/article/digitalnext/teens-prefer-twitter-facebook/235934/

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hristov
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?

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ThomPete
Isn't that what he is doing? The headline is a question.

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hristov
You know, I thought I was a funny guy before I started posting on Hacker News.

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dguaraglia
Your brand of sarcasm doesn't translate well to written form :)

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recoil
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...](http://techcrunch.com/2009/08/30/why-dont-teens-tweet-we-asked-
over-10000-of-them/) [2]
[http://blog.nielsen.com/nielsenwire/online_mobile/teens-
dont...](http://blog.nielsen.com/nielsenwire/online_mobile/teens-dont-tweet-
twitters-growth-not-fueled-by-youth/)

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ThomPete
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.

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kleiba
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. :-)

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kuahyeow
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

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smashing
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.

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mtr
Is FB really that hard to setup and use? I'm most likely to respond to someone
on FB and often find myself wondering if it wouldn't be better to respond
somehow with a CC: to Twitter but it's not obvious how to do this effectively.

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jinushaun
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?

