Social Media’s Biz Opps Dominated By Young Entrepreneurs

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Little did we know how much the face of social media would change on February 4, 2004 when Mark Zuckerberg, a no-name college student at Harvard, launched Facebook. He came up with the idea in high school but decided to wait until college to further develop the platform.

Zuckerberg is only one example of these young entrepreneurs who are changing the social networking sector–either creating them, devising new tools or developing apps–as each day passes.

Why is the sector dominated by young entrepreneurs?

Reality check: kids younger and younger are growing up using social media on an everyday basis. Reality check: they understand it better than their parents, teachers and probably their future bosses. When my 10-year-old sister this morning decided to create her own Facebook profile, I was stunned. Since when do 5th graders Facebook? Before you know it, they’ll be Tweeting and connecting on LinkedIn like everybody else. What’s next? Signing up for one social network or another as soon as you can learn to read?  The thing is the younger population brings something new to the table; they see what the older population on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn don’t. They are the future innovators of social media.

Here are four social networks that were founded by young entrepreneurs:

Twitter

Founders: Jack Dorsey, Evan Williams and Biz Stone

Age (at founding): Early 30′s

Facebook

Founder: Mark Zuckerberg

Age (at founding): College

Ning

Founders: Marc L. Andreessen and Gina Bianchinihe.

Age (at founding): Early 30′s

Myspace

Founder: Tom Anderson

Age (at founding): Early 30′s.

To name a few:

Zynga Game Networks

The force behind this game network that’s published Farmville, Mafia Wars and CafeVille is Mark Pincus, who founded the site in his 30′s. Years before, he created Tribe.net, one of the first social networks.

TweetMeme

Nick Halstead is yet another example of a young entrepreneur leading the social network movement. Founder of TweetMeme the most popular link sharing system for Twitter.

TweetDeck

TweetDeck is the leading browser for the real-time and social web, allowing users to connect with Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and MySpace. Ian Dodsworth, founder and his team of young entrepreneur keep improving the way we interact socially.

Mashable

Mashable is one of the top 10 blogs in the world and the leading social media blog. At age 20 Pete Cashmore founded Mashable and since then has been named most influential Briton and most influential Twitterer.

Avenue Social

This Facebook application firm was founded by Salman Ghaznnavi in his late 20′s, is a part of a huge number of social media, application development firms that are becoming more and more popular.

What do you think? Will it be the young social network oriented entrepreneurs that will continue to dominate online, in the future?