Newsweek has an article
about the way the 50-plus have miraculously discovered the joys of social networking.
Now here is a factlet for
your next presentation: “1 million of the more than 215 million social
networkers regularly active today are older than 50.” Who says so? A report
from Deloitte (not yet available). The same report, so Newsweek says, forecasts
the numbers to increase to 20 million.
I would think that my piece
of wet seaweed (English slang for a tool to guess a number) is as good as Deloitte’s
and a 0.5% share of over-50s users is way too low. Don’t believe all you
read, even from swanky consultancies.
Yet another Factlet: Deloitte’s
study predicts that baby boomers, unlike those of the MySpace generation, will
be willing to pay subscription fees for sites that offer the tech support, services
and privacy they desire”. You can sense a palpable increase in the entrepreneurial
interest in the 50-plus and social networking as people read these words.
For the adventurous amongst
you go to Google and press ‘Groups’ rather than using the default
‘Web’. Key in something like “over-50s” or ‘boomers’.
You have just discovered the world of Newsgroups. There are 30,000+ of these
groups that discuss everything you can possibly think of – the technical
to the obscene.
Newsgroups were one of the
first applications developed using the Internet, after e-mail. We are talking
many decades before the Web was born. Today’s boomers were the founders
and users of newsgroups. As much as every generation likes to think the things
they do are unique they are often only a technical improvement on something
that has gone before. So it is with social networking. When you deconstruct
all of the nonsense that is talked about Web 2.0 it all comes down to creating
some good (and some bad) ways for humans to communicate – that ain’t
new.
Dick Stroud
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