My colleague Werner just sent me this article: IMing divides Teens, Adults. It reports on the different IM usage patterns between teenagers and those in their 50’s. (I don’t know why there’s such a large age gap between their study participants. I think you’d find similar differences between 20-somethings and 30-somethings.)

You probably know this already anecdotally, but it is interesting to see it broken out with numbers. For example, most adults who IM send less than 25 a day, whereas most teenagers send more than 25. Twenty percent of IM’ing teenagers send over 100 IM’s a day. Basically, adults use email; teenagers use IM.

While we can’t quite say that email is exclusively a technology for the older generation, I think it is becoming increasingly important to consider how to support these different generations that use different communication modes. What happens when we are all part of the same workforce? What will be the most effective way for a company to communicate?