Why kids and teens use FB and Myspace but not Twitter | Hacker News Reader

Why kids and teens use FB and Myspace but not Twitter

lsvp.wordpress.com

25 pointsjeremyliew7 comments

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.)

I would agree with you, twitter does not have that social feeling yet, maybe because they have followers and not friends in it.

I still prefer facebook ... have had it since 2004, hardly use twitter. I see twitter as more of a way to distribute information to everyone(friends and strangers)

As an adult I use Facebook more like a teen. I'm so busy I don't have time to really interact with my friends, so I can keep in touch there. I think of it as a lightweight way to connect with people.

I use twitter to keep in touch with my techno-peeps and for business. I started following those in the know in a couple of areas and try to give quality updates or responses to questions. I also use it in conjunction with a couple of sites I'm developing.

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.

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.)

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.

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

That's how I started.

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