While Facebook took a few years to grow from adolescent chat site to its current broader appeal (no doubt to the displeasure of the college kids), Twitter has leaped into the public consciousness in a much shorter time.
About a year ago, the free micro-blogging service got about 100 mentions in all media in a given week. Maybe a dozen or so of those were in major newspapers and magazines. Last week, by comparison, Twitter was mentioned more than 1,000 times in all media, and more than 200 times in major publications.
Twitter users are overwhelmingly young, but unlike most of the other social networks, Twitter is not dominated by the youngest of young adults, according to a new survey by the Pew Internet & American Life Project.
The median age of a Twitter user is 31, compared to 27 for MySpace and 26 for Facebook. (The business networking tool LinkedIn skews much more heavily to an older audience. Median age: 40.7.)
"What we don't see with Twitter ... that we do see in [social network service] use, is a decline in use in the 25-34 age group," Amanda Lenhart, a senior research specialist for Pew in Washington, wrote in an e-mail. "I think that's one of the more surprising findings."
Twitter epitomizes how new media improves as more people find new and different ways to use it. The earliest Twitter users, in 2006, basically shot each other tweets about what they were up to at that moment. Knowing that a friend was "eating a sandwich" or "out shopping" might be useful to know now and then, but Twitter wouldn't have gained many users or attracted major venture capital if its utility had ended there.
It's estimated that 6 million people use Twitter.com, maybe up sixfold from a year ago. Since the company doesn't release numbers, measuring the Twitter-verse is an educated guess. It could be two or three times that many people, since the Pew folks estimated that 11 percent of adults are on a service like Twitter, and there are now roughly 200 million adults online in the U.S.
Like any communications tool beyond cup and string, it gets more useful as more people use it. And as people and companies find new ways to put out information (beyond what they're eating at that moment), the service keeps getting more interesting.
As with Facebook and the iPhone, the creative applications - the "apps" - that various people have developed for Twitter improve it all the time.
