I don’t have a lot of time today, because of an early flight back to the States tomorrow and I am fresh out of half written blog posts that I started before this two week trip so that I would have something to write about.  That said, I noticed something I thought you might find interesting.  Business Insider has published results from a new study that show that 87% of American’s are aware of Twitter (only a single percentage point behind facebook).  That said, there are nearly six times as many people using Facebook as Twitter (41% to 7%).  I thought about this a few times today and could not come up with a theory that I honestly believed on this.  I had a few guesses, but nothing that I really believed explained it.  So instead of waiting until I had a theory I believed, I thought I’d throw my guesses out there in raw form and see if any readers want to argue for one and/or propose one of their own.  Perhaps if you’re a facebook user but NOT a twitter user you could offer your reasons?  The list of hypotheses is not sorted in any order, but instead numbered so that the items can be referenced individually.

1. The most obvious is that Twitter (while it doesn’t require it) is MUCH easier on a smartphone and not everyone has one.
2. People are looking to have tight control over their social network, and in Twitter you can’t control who follows you.
3. Facebook is older then Twitter and lags simply because it has not had enough time to build a user base.
4. There are more people using Twitter then it appears, they just only follow and do so by manually going from one page to another.
5. 140 characters really is too hard for most people to state an opinion in.
6. Twitter is something that’s a nice compliment to an already well established web identity (and therefor poses another place that they can express themselves in more then 140 characters), but Facebook caters to people who only have one home on the web.
7. People’s desire for real time information is overstated.
8. People prefer to read information that is already aggregated and sorted for them.  Facebook offers a sorted timeline and Twitter doesn’t.  Additionally, any celebrity posts that are made on Twitter are available to news agencies who will repeat them if they’re worth repeating.
9. Facebook is an easier concept to understand then Twitter.
10. The fact that Twitter allows for anonymity makes people reluctant to join the site, or makes the site less valuable.

I’ll leave you with one parting thought that occurred to me, but which I could not determine an opinion on.  Do you think Twitter would have been better off or worse off if it had rolled out to college students (or some other group) first, and then only to the mass public after it had gained sufficient inertia?