• TechCrunch, Tuesday, July 14, 2009 12:45 PM

Matthew Robson, a 15-year-old intern at Morgan Stanley, raised eyebrows earlier this week with a report on how teenagers are consuming media, and why Twitter isn't particularly popular among the UK Gen Y crowd. Well, TechCrunch contributor Daniel Brusilovsky -- himself a 16-year-old high school student -- notes that Twitter isn't particularly popular among the U.S. Gen Y crowd, either. He uses comScore numbers to back up his claim: in June, 2009, just 11.3% of visitors to Twitter.com in the U.S. were between the ages of 12 and 17. Worldwide, the number of visitors under 18 drops to 4.4%.

So why aren't young people using Twitter? As Brusilovsky says, "Twitter is a different type of social network than Facebook." Whereas Facebook is about sharing information with friends in a closed, secure network, Twitter is the exact opposite, allowing anyone to follow your status updates (note: there are controls for this, although this is not a default setting). "It's a completely open network that makes teenagers feel 'unsafe' about posting their content there, because who knows who will read it," Brusilovsky says. Twitter is also seen as more expensive than Facebook, as many people use their mobile phones to send SMS updates to Twitter, which cost money. Meanwhile, it's strange that young users, who tend to be early adopters of new media, shouldn't drive a phenomenon like Twitter. So what is popular among teens right now? According to Brusilovsky, Apple devices like the iPhone and iPod are big, as are other smartphones from BlackBerry and Palm, and of course, social networks like Facebook and MySpace.

Read the whole story at TechCrunch »