DrV’s new post, a discussion on why teenagers don’t use Twitter (itself inspired by a 15-year-old Morgan Stanley intern’s tech report), started me thinking on some conversations I’ve had this week with various teenagers aged 14 to 17.

Now these are pretty web-savvy teens – they have their own domain names, build websites for their schools, and had plenty to say when I picked their brains on Google Wave, Bing, Wolfram Alpha, iPhone, and a lot more. However, they were nowhere near as excited as I was about Twitter. Perceptions of the micro-blogging website (even this terminology was alien to them) generally fell along these lines:

• Twitter is for old people. They’ve heard about Twitter as a networking tool, but believe that networking is “something to worry about when I get a job”. Ditto for the “personal brand”, which has become one of my favourite ideas to talk about of late.
• Twitter is for following celebrities. A few were vaguely interested in following Obama (and Ashton Kutcher?)…otherwise…
• Nobody they know (or care about) is on Twitter. And thus it’s…
• Unnecessary. The old argument that Twitter is an entire social network dedicated to Facebook statuses. Why sign up for another site, especially when the attention span of the internet is so short? Even among fad-happy teenagers, there’s a certain amount of backlash against the concept of hype itself. They want to be given a little credit. And sometimes they would like to be convinced of a tool’s utility over its popularity.
• …And even unsafe? “I don’t want all my stuff on the internet like that.” Broadcasting beyond their immediate Facebook network has little appeal to teenagers. The risks of exposure and loss of privacy far outweigh any perceived benefits.

For example, one of the teens I talked to set up a website with a forum and contact list to help his friends from summer camp stay in touch during the school year. However, he balked when a few camp administrators got wind of the site and signed up. He later explained to me that since the point was to connect with a very specific group of friends, privacy and exclusivity was paramount. They had no news that they wanted to broadcast to the world, but they certainly had information that they wanted to keep from the world. Their purpose was therefore far better served by a private forum than by Twitter.

I’ve decided that it’s not that teenagers have no use for networking – they simply have no use for Twitter-esque professional networking until they reach a very specific activation energy. Perhaps by starting a business or heaven forbid…getting old

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