I’m on Facebook since going back to school at UNC–and I’m discovering more and more folks my age (40+) that are on there now, too. I was probably the oldest UNC student to be on Facebook at the time, but my student colleagues were all on there, so I joined, too.
Now that I’ve graduated, I thought we were all supposed to be on LinkedIn–isn’t it the “grown-up Facebook?”
Research does show that more post-college grads are on Facebook–those over 35 jumped 98%.
Is there a place for both in our lives?
-karen
Filed under: Trust
I’m also in the over 40 crowd, and as of mid December will just have finished my MBA at Wake Forest University. I’m on linkedIn and Facebook as are several of my classmates.
I share your desire that there should be one place where all our info could be, and there are some schemes that allow that. For example your Yahoo Mail ID can be used on Flickr and other Yahoo owned sites, Ning IDs can be used on any social network using the Ning architecture. But most important are authentication tools like Open ID which are shared authentication schemes that may be used by multiple social networking sites, so that you can use one username/password/profile on multiple sites.
I think that these types of ID sharing tools are the way to go for the following reason. LinkedIn is great for professional networking and Facebook is great for keeping up with friends, but they – or any site – would dilute their value if they tried to be all things to all people.
Of course, there’s a lot of value in your demographic information so don’t count on Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace etc. opening up any time soon. Too bad!