Sorry, but social networks simply aren’t cool anymore among the 15-to-24-year-old crowd. (I’m 23, and have all but quit Facebook (I stopped tweeting a few months ago), but that’s more of a function of me being an anti-social cad than anything else.) Why? It seems the older crowd—people 25 and older—has given social networks the unmistakable stench of being not cool. Why would an 18-year-old kid want to mimic the lifestyle of a 30-year-old?
Now, while I’m thrilled to read this news, there are a few caveats. It’s not like 15-to-24-year-olds are not using the Internet anymore. (No, they’re using YouTube to listen to music, and using Rapidshare to download TV shows.) And a lot of those older users (25+) are responsible for the growth of Twitter of late.
Breaking down the numbers—all these numbers come from a recent Ofcom study, which I should have mentioned far earlier in this post—some 46 percent of people aged 25-to-34 regularly check Facebook compared to 40 percent one year ago. Meanwhile, 50 percent of kids aged 15-to-24 regularly check Facebook, down from 55 percent one year ago. Our own DBru notes kids don’t like this stuff because it doesn’t feel safe.
And another data set suggests that kids under the age of 16 are still crazy for social network sites. So who knows what’s going on?
In any event, I look forward to the day when the word “Twitter” is expunged from the English language.