Friday, February 22, 2008

Nifty informal study: Twitter average age

Nothin' But SocNET asks: how old are you?

KC blogger and Twitterer @zenaweist decided to put this question out to the Twittersphere, and it got forwarded on by several other KC locals, including @linuxchic, jeffisageek, and myself.

So far, the average age of those polled is 37. Suprising? Perhaps. She mentions that a person she was in a meeting with (discussing online communications) said that Twitter was for the young, in that it takes a young person to "get it", as it were. But Zena's results seem to give the lie to that assumption.

Personally, I'm not surprised. Twitter is very easy to use - there's a gTalk interface, so I just have the Twitterbot on my gTalk contact list and send my tweets out that way. No need to go to the Twitter website. No need to log in every time - I verified my identity once and that was it.

And more broadly, I think that this suggests that social networking in general is not only "for the young". Certainly you see a preponderance of young folk on sites like MySpace and Facebook, (which, coincidentally, happen to be the most well-publicized social networking sites) but those aren't the only social networking tools out there. There's a whole world of social networking tools on the Internet, and a whole world of people using them.

2 comments:

Chris Riebschlager said...

Hey! Found your site through Tony's KC. Welcome to town.

I'm assuming that Twitter skews older since it's not geared toward accumulating friends and weird games/apps involving pirates and vampires. I really like it. It's just a stripped down framework that allows you to keep up with what's going on with your friends. Nothing more, nothing less.

If you'd like to add another KC person to your 'follow' list:

twitter.com/riebschlager

And while you're clicking on things... http://www.the816.com/

Weist Family said...

Thanks, Kit, for the shout out on the impromptu Twitter age question.

See you on twitter!
Zena