Jon Bernstein

While on this side of the Atlantic Facebook has been enjoying an upsurge of traffic thanks to its vanity publishing project (aka Facebook usernames), on the other side of the  Atlantic the social networking site is showing its age .

The ever readable Hitwise blog looks at the Facebook user base by age range to see how it has changed over the last 12 months. And this is what it found:

18 – 24 year-olds  -19%

25 – 34 year-olds +12%

35 – 44 year-olds +7%

Hitwise’s Bill Tancer speculates that these figures, coupled with a dramatic upsurge in traffic last month, indicate that Facebook has hit the mainstream. He then ponders:

If that is true, and early adopters are, in the case of social networking, the 18-24 year old crowd, where are younger Internet users flocking to today?

Of course, the Hitwise numbers are relative – and Facebook still has a very sizeable young audience – but perhaps it’s time to look at the average age of the Twittersphere.

 Twitter started with a relatively mature audience, certainly in the UK, but I’d speculate that the celeb takeover (call it the Kutcher effect) has had 18 – 24 year-olds all aTwitter.