Teenagers vs. The Internet: Teens Win

Today I was talking to a friend who has a teenage daughter. One night a month or so ago, she was babysitting and brought along her new phone. Which mom and dad are paying for. Since IM worked, she assumed it was free. I'm sure you see where this is going.

A one-day $900+ phone bill later, they had a talk with her about her IM-ing habits. I recalled the discussions I'd seen about a teen racking up 14k messages in a single month, and people claiming to have seen twice that.

The math is just astounding, until you realize how they're doing it: Every kid has a contact group of all their friends, and every IM goes to all of them. They've built their own follow lists, and are tweeting constantly.

In other words, teenagers have already routed around Twitter and created a distributed system to solve this use case.