Sunday, February 10, 2008

Facebook: Age Versus Membership

It's been a nice long weekend. This morning, I'm reflecting back on the weekend and on a topic I think of often.

When making weekend plans, I either talk to the person in person, call their home / work / cell phone, send an email, send an instant message, or send a text message.

What determines the method that I choose? Mostly it's determined by age. With a fair amount of accuracy, I've been able to segment my friends in my mind by age. Working simply by this one factor gets me the most positive results when I'm scheduling plans.

Along the same lines, I've noticed that certain age groups of my friends use online social networking sites, such as Myspace.com and Facebook.com. Within the users, their activity can even be broken down. Older users may not even place a photo on their profile. The youngest users will put many photos, including photos where they're questionably dressed or intoxicated. They will also post their e-mail address, phone number, work information, etc.

The reason that I think about this topic so much is that I'm smack in the middle of these two extremes. Folks just a few years younger than me are going wild on the Internet, and those just a few years older are barely interested to stick in a toe.

To test out my theory, I plotted out the number of Facebook users registered from my high school in Moore, Oklahoma-- by graduation year. At the low, I found only seven members from the class of 1990. At the high, I found 196 members from the class of 2006.

Check it out:

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