Twitter’s main audience is adults rather than teens - that’s been known for a while, and figures from Nielsen now confirm this. What I find interesting about this is not that Twitter should be doing more to attract teens, as some people seem to suggest, but rather that is shows what Twitter is good at. Twitter’s service has been quite a blank canvas in many ways, with people using it however they want, and a huge number of third party apps tweaking and adding features such as groups and search, to name just a couple. So to show a large adult following confirms that a very large number of people - particularly in the US and the UK - find it useful.

So why adults, mainly? A good blog post from Ben Parr at Mashable discusses some reasons behind this, and I think puts the main reasons well (and has lots of good comments). To summarise and add a little of my own point of view, it’s not primarily a venue for chatting with friends and sharing pictures, music and videos. It’s more of a broadcasting platform where celebrities, news organisations and companies try to entertain and update an audience. Like a very big, lightweight, multiple RSS service. Twitter is also very much an open community, and young people tend more to stay within communities they know. It’s also a great platform for sharing and developing knowledge rather than getting a quick overview from answers.com, wikipedia and so on. So, to put it in a nutshell, most teenagers get what they want elsewhere, and more easily.

Which, given Twitter’s overall popularity, is hardly a problem. The age profile is actually an advantage for Twitter, I think. One of MySpace’s problems is that a younger audience gets older fast, and their habits change. Having an audience mostly in middle adulthood is perfect for customer retention and the service’s long-term stability. Additionally, the fact that a lot of people use the service professionally means there are opportunities for paid premium content and services.

I think what surprises many people about Twittter’s age profile is that it’s pretty new. Young people tend to be early adopters, and are well understood by developers of social media applications, who are often also young. But actually, despite its youth, Twitter is now well established, in its maturity rather than early adoption phase. Who uses a mature product depends on who needs it. In this case, the wider community. Granted, it still hasn’t settled on a long-term business model, and it’s a relatively new entrant to a relatively new set of social technologies, but it should be taken seriously, and recognized for what it is - which is now much clearer.

As always, it feels too early to go back to work. But it’s also the right time to look ahead and get on with the year. A lot of companies have delayed their market budgeting and planning till the new year to see how the land lies, so now’s also a good time to look at the industry environment and what marketing and PR are going to be most cost-effective. Our CEO Ralf Haller recently wrote his predictions for what will be hot in product marketing in 2009, and what not, and I think he’s spot on. So rather than making my own, here are three from other industry experts that I found interesting.

1. Business social networking to grow

Brad Shimmin, principal analyst at Current Analysis in a group podcast for Briefings Direct:

The first one for me is vendors tackling enterprise-plus-consumer based social networks, a blended view of those. Enterprise-focused vendors are going to do more than simply sink info from public sites like Facebook. They’re going to take that information and build into or out from the enterprise into those social networks and drive information from those. It’s going to become a two-way street.

You’re going to see folks like Facebook, and most notably, LinkedIn, working in the other direction themselves, and with third parties, to develop enterprise-bound social networks. Look for those to emerge next year.

And from Drupal CEO Dries Buytaert
Social publishing (blogs, forums, wikis, social networks, etc.) will become more pervasive and continue to make inroads in organizations seeking to facilitate collaboration between teams and departments. These applications, while nothing new, make many aspects of business better, are here to stay, and will mature over time.

2. Brands get promoted directly via microblogging & social networking

From The Marketing Consigliere:

Brands will use Twitter and some people will tolerate push communication.
Just as the original commercial Internet “pioneers” were eclipsed by corporate suits in regard to the continued development and exploitation of the Internet, brands will become a more dominant player in this tool. While the Innovators and Early Adopters who embraced Twitter may feel their “find” has been violated, this is just another stage in the product life cycle as the Early Majority and Late Majority get on board. Many of these later adopters will be complacent with one-way messaging, just as they have been while using other media…

As B2B buyers become less reluctant to use “consumer” apps in their daily work routine, they will accept this relatively new form of blogging as the primary means of communication with their vendors. (Personally, I doubt we will see Twitter etc. being the primary means in Europe this year, but interesting that it is taking off so fast in the US. )

3. New market entrants make fast impact using online marketing

From Joe McKendrick, also for Briefings Direct:

We are going to see folks — maybe IT people, or people who work for vendors and have been laid off — have the ability to start their own business at a very low cost of entry. On the flip side of that, the whole social-networking and cloud-computing phenomena, companies have these tools as well to employ low-cost methods to reach their markets and to interact with their customers. We’re going to see a lot more of that as well. A marketing campaign doesn’t have to cost $200,000 to reach your customers. You can use the social network, the Web 2.0 tools, to interact and collaborate and find out what’s going on in your markets at a very relatively low cost.

With the end of the year almost here, iand a number of recent stories, now seems like a good time to take stock of what’s happening on the social web. A mini news-roundup:

1. Facebook recently tried to buy to Twitter, perhaps just before their own valuation fell too far, but for that or other reasons, Twitter held out.
2. Facebook Connect service was launched, immediately followed by a competitive open-source solution from Google, called Friend Connect, supported by MySpace and others. Bot services extend users’ web personae and logins across participating sites.
3. Browser plugins support Google’s favoured OpenID website login system, and are offered as an integral part of Flock, the ’social web browser’.

I don’t want to go in-depth on these - links are to ars technica’s

excellent coverage. But they don’t name what I think is the elephant in the room, the iPhone, and other smartphones and small portables. I think 2009 will be an important year for them, recession or not. Laptops and desktops are essentially for work, and businesses and private users properly want to separate work and personal activities. The mobile phone is anyway right at the heart of interpersonal communication anyway and now offers better keyboards, screen resolution and apps. Mobile computing for business travellers is also pretty easy now on these devices. So for one thing I think both Google, Facebook and MySpace could become a little less dominant.

So this is a time of experimentation with a lot of new potential players creating apps, and brand loyalty is less of an issue when crossing platforms, so plenty of developments are possible, e.g:

1. Social networks are used more to organize the web experience and integrate it with users social experience more.
2. Location-based apps are increasingly players in both social networking and search functions.
3. Smaller screens create opportunities for a less complicated news aggregator than Google’s igoogle page, for example.
4. The browser and home page may become less crucial because of how apps are accessed on smartphones.
5. Aggregators of social networking sites, plus systems like OpenID, mean it is easy to have multiple memberships.
6. Twitter will continue to do well because of their minimalism.

OpenID and Friend Connect might also create opportunities for business social networking apps, though people will probably use them with caution at first for security and reputation reasons. Hard to see anyone getting ahead of Twitter’s combination of usability, flexibility, and discretion over how open to be, and Twitter groups could be key to directing traffic - functioning like a bunch of loose social networks and a dynamic news and views portal at the same time. Facebook might wish they had been able to grab them while they could.

Twitter made headlines even on the airwaves last week as it poured out instant updates on the Mumbai terrorist attacks, leading CNN to say that the events would be as famous as a landmark for social media as for terrorism. But they probably spoke too soon, and maybe a bit disrespectfully, too. Twitter repeatedly broke the story in two ways - i.e. not just new, but ‘unusable’, as the flurry of updates turned into a whirlwind. So not just Twitter’s finest hour, but perhaps the one where, following its big successes in keeping track of Apple expos and presidential campaigns, its limitations became clear.

It will be interesting to see where this goes next. It is clear that Twitter is now very much a part of life, and it seems to be even clearer that the need for such a service, though strongly felt, is in some ways not being met. Putting these facts together, perhaps the market is open to a new brand of Twitter, aimed particularly at journalists or those in the news community, but open to others, too, provided they adhere to tagging rules, for example. It’s also clear that a good service of this kind is worth paying for if you are a news professional - so time for a really creative business model…

Om reported on May 21that Twitter had finally got hold of its $15 million second round, with a valuation said to be $80 million. Past backer USV is said to have contributed, as well as an unnamed main investor rumoured to be Spark Capital of Boston.

But no one seems to be any clearer about its business model. One commentator, Joseph Weisenthal at the Washington Post, suggests that the money is just buying time - plus a few servers to help with their notorious reliability problems. But this may not be enough. A recent post on the company’s blog states that the root of the problem is unknown - something made clearer by Nik Cubrilovic at TechCrunch.

So what is Google doing all this time? If there is some really serious work to be done on scaling and on the business model, you can be pretty sure that they will be doing it with the Jaiku microblogging service they acquired last year. The money will help Twitter for now, but unless they can start generating real revenue soon, they will be trying for a third round within the foreseeable future, and wasting a lot of time in the bargain. Could this end up as another Netscape vs. Explorer?

So many comments on the ‘Will they, won’t they?’ at the moment, that I expect some of the betting agencies are getting interested. Here are a few of the predictions, and the odds that I would expect to be offered(?):

Microsoft buys Yahoo within the next 6 months 4/6

Private equity firms launch bids as Yahoo share price plummets 12/1

Shareholder class action against Yahoo for holding out 5/1

Jerry Yang gets fired 8/1

Stever Ballmer gets fired 20/1

Microsoft acquires Facebook instead 8/1

Microsoft acquires Twitter instead 50/1

With Lee Mighdoll leaving Twitter this week, shortly following the departure of Blaine Cook, there are obviously big problems there. They’ve had lots of complaints about outages and poor service quality recently. So much so that Robert Scoble wonders about their future, and whether FriendFeed will take over their market when they go down.

That’s probably a bit over-pessimistic. So, people are using social news aggregators - of which there are now more than enough to choose from (and FriendFeed still seems to be the pick of them) - to communicate through and in parallel to other services. But Twitter has a large user base, and a unique but non-essential service. As aggregation services mean users can switch temporarily with ease, there is little incentive to abandon it.

Mighdoll had clearly been appointed to sort out scalability, and presumably this was why he had to go. But people are still guessing what Twitter’s plan is or was according to a great piece by Duncan Riley at TechCruch, Twitter’s Business Plan Still MIA.

A couple of months ago, bub.blicio.us noted that in contrast the the Web 1.0 bubble, in Web 2.0:
Companies are using the money to build businesses and communities with many already generating revenue. The focus seems more about strengthening the foundation for scale rather than cashing out. The problems with Twitter have been ‘where’s the money?’, and ‘where’s the scale?’