Diablog

Twitter, after all, is the cyber-sensation du jour. It's growing like crazy and is even impinging on the British legal system (as evidenced by its unravelling of the Trafigura super-injunction). Yet the kids who supposedly drive every internet phenomenon have little interest in it. The statistics support this: Twitter is a preoccupation of older generations; according to comScore, only 11% of its users are aged 17 or younger.

Ah well, you say, at least teenagers are the motive force behind social networking, which many people see as the most important online development of the past five years. Here again, the statistics tell a different story. According to the New York Times, for example, teenagers now account for only 14% of MySpace users and 9% of Facebook's. Yet it is Facebook that is growing like crazy: it now has over 300 million users (and is adding 600,000 new users a day at present). And most of them are oldies.
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And the meaning of all this? Simple: when it comes to predicting the future of cyberspace, the only certainty is that no one knows anything, least of all teenagers. Now where's that walking stick..?

The Observer