It's not that the "teen" apps are the ones that matter. Don't take Facebook / Myspace so literally. It's pointing to the fact that major opportunities are being created that are obvious to one generation and almost oblivous from another.

Another factor can be that the previous generation doesn't see what's such a big deal about a groundbreaking technology. A lot of the folks 10 years older than me had trouble seeing what was so revolutionary about HTML and a browser (you're requesting a file and displaying it through a markup language? OK... and how is this different?) Personally, it took me a long time to grasp why blogging offered so much more than just maintaining a personal website (that said, RSS did seem very cool from the get-go). Facebook was hard to distinguish from earlier (may I call them 1.0?) applications that were "basically a bunch of web pages linked together" (a bunch of these went down with the first dot-com bubble).

So another risk is too much awareness - rather than being technically clueless, the older crowd goes too far in the other direction.

A handful of genes separates a human fom a sea cumcumber (ok, maybe a little more than a handful)... uhh, how is this different from using DNA to make more DNA? ;)

@ Tichy - I really like your point about a younger generation missing out on an older trend. Perhaps we're just used to seeing more opportunities creep up from the younger generation than vice versa.

Point well made.

Sure, and I have asked myself that question before: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22696

But in theory it works both ways - older generations might see business opportunities the younger ones are missing. I know I wish I had thought more about certain things when I was younger...

And since society seems to be aging, the advantage might actually be on the side of the older generation.