Teens, after being friended by parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles on Facebook, have moved to Twitter to get a little more privacy.
Until recently, Twitter was thought of as mainly for those promoting their business or themselves, but a recent Pew Internet & American Life Project study showed that teens 12 to 17 doubled their presence on Twitter in the last two years. While still relatively small, jumping from 8 to 16 percent, it shows a growing trend.
"I love twitter, it's the only thing I have to myself ... cause my parents don't have one," Britteny Praznik, a 17-year-old from just outside Milwaukee, tweeted.
She joined last summer, after several people at her high school started tweeting. "It just sort of caught on," she told the Associated Press. Many teens don't use real names or even have locked accounts, so only friends have access.
After the rampant dissatisfaction with Facebook's Timeline and privacy concerns, the move to Twitter may seem long overdue. For teens, who are now being monitored by older relatives joining Facebook, thw social network probably hasn't been a private place for a while.
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However, there are significant problems with Twitter -- mainly that it sometimes just doesn't work. Facebook may not be someone's cup of tea, but doesn't have a legendary "Fail Whale" like Twitter does. Twitter also had to purchase Tweetdeck to get a decent user interface -- but the company seems uninterested in keeping it in good working order (I've tried to send a scheduled tweet for the last six months, and I've succeeded about twice.)
Twitter isn't the easy answer to Facebook or Facebook Timeline, but it is becoming a much more attractive alternative.
