News Report #5

"All in the Facebook Family: Older Generations Join Social Networks"
John D. Sutter
04/13/2009
http://www.cnn.com/2009/TECH/04/13/social.network.older/index.html


Once again this is an article about Facebook. However, it isn’t about privacy issues or sexual predators like my previous news reports. This article focuses on the uprising of the “mature” crowd, which could be anyone from your parents to grandparents. Yes, according to this article, many parents and grandparents are signing up to keep up with their families that are in different locations throughout the United States or World for that matter. According to “Insider Facebook,” females are the gender of the older generation that is predominately signing up. I think this was bound to happen because a lot of older people started off on MySpace, however, they have more issues in terms of spam than Facebook. It seems that Facebook put a lot more emphasis on security before taking in such a large following. This in turn reflects a better image. I agree with the interface issues. Especially over the last few months Facebook has changed theirs twice. This can get confusing for people who aren’t familiar with computers. My sister, who is 28, has a Facebook and MySpace account, but would rarely go on Facebook because according to her “it’s confusing.” I agreed with her, but told her she would like it a lot better because it’s just a lot cleaner in terms of styling and page load speed is faster (most PHP sites are faster than ASP.Net (MySpace)). Once she got the hang of it, she logged on more and we communicate more frequently. I still talk to my parents on the phone, so they have yet to create a social networking account. While there are increasing numbers of the older crowd accessing these sites, I do not think there will be a day when every person over 40 has a page. It is good to keep up with your family, but you lose that certain form of interpersonal communication that you get when talking on the phone and some conservatives will probably not break the trend.