Social Networking - No Longer Just For The Kids

For a long time, social media was just for 'the kids'.  However, one of the most interesting recent online trends has been the take up of social networks by older groups.  For instance, Nielsen's latest research notes that a whopping forty-seven per cent of people who are online in the UK now use Facebook.  Furthermore, the report notes that, if recent trends were to continue, "by mid-June 2009 there would be as many 35-49 year olds on Facebook as 18-34 year olds."  With such developments in mind, the supersonic Danah Boyd has written up a great (and short) talk here emphasising that now social media is the norm, the time has come to focus on its uses rather than the technology itself.  Boyd's work is academic in style, but a couple of sections caught my eye: "Marketers know all about stickiness, but how many of you measure network density? You purchase all sorts of data from Nielsen and comScore that tells you about uniques, but do you know anything about the cluster dynamics of the users? Are you able to see when the network graph is reaching a sustainable point or, more importantly, when things are starting to fracture?".  And when it comes to product development:  "We can continue to design and deploy, but one of the amazing things that is happening in the realm of social media is that folks are starting to iterate with their users. This creates an interesting opportunity for us. We need to be able to evolve with our products as people begin to use it. This can be quite tricky, especially for folks who are used to a build, test, and deploy methodology. As a developer, you are no longer simply an author of software. You are an actor in a process in which software is being developed and repurposed. The key lesson from the rise of social media for you is that a great deal of software is best built as a coordinated dance between you and the users."