Hey they, Geek Troika denizens! It’s been a little while, but we’re back for your listening pleasure! A bunch of crazy news has happened, and your loyal traversers of the geek realm have come and brought back the slabs of goodness. We’ve also brought along a guest. Well, more like dragged him into the mix. But he came willingly! (that’s what she said) Anypoo..
As I engage across various social networks, there’s been an interesting sort of trend/pattern/whatever developing that I’ve noticed. The tends to be an older audience skew for several social media products which pop up across the Internet. This isn’t a hard and fast rule - plenty of young people are on Flickr and Facebook, for sure - but for some of the major networks I participate in, I definitely detect an older set of users. For the longest time, the people I saw using Twitter the most, with the greatest frequency, were individuals in their mid thirties to late forties. This is further exacerbated on a site like FriendFeed, where the overall demographic is a bit wider, but the skew is still towards an older audience.
What is the reason for this? There’s no clear answer, really. I speculate that younger people (from my age bracket on down) are lazier, and don’t want to invest the time on establishing an entirely new network on a new service. Facebook works fine for most needs, since almost everyone a young person knows is likely on Facebook. Twitter is a wildcard, especially for its limited set of features. FriendFeed has the same sort of problem: since FriendFeed aggregates feeds from all of your different presences, it’s kind of pointless to jump on the service involvement only really exists in one form on one service (Facebook).
Lately, there has been an influx of younger users onto Twitter, but Twitter at this point is where Facebook is when it opened itself up to high school users: a tested proving ground, populated by savvy users with an understanding of how the service operates. I speculate it will take a much longer period of time before you start seeing seventeen year olds appearing on FriendFeed or Brightkite.
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