Had to share this graphic from the Sunday Times chronicling Facebook’s torrid growth. It is interesting to see how the age distribution of its users has changed since 2004. Back then I was on the far right of the bell curve, now I am somewhat in the middle. I am not sure what drives the bimodal distribution, but if I had to guess, it would be students entering grad school (note peaks at 18 and 26/27). The fastest growing group of members between 2/08 and 1/09 were those over the age of 35. This is not entirely surprising since most of the younger tech set were early adopters and joined before 2/08. These users are disrupting the community by trying to combine two worlds that want to remain separate, that of the millennials and babyboomers.
A recent NYT article titled Putting Yourself Out There on a Shelf to Buy showed me just how out of touch these users, and the author of the article, are. Simply putting up a profile isn’t going to add any value from a networking perspective. Its like trying to sell a single can of peas by putting it on a low shelf in one of the many aisles of Whole Foods (and in the wrong section!). You have to fight for shelf space by building your network, and making sure that network is made up of valuable members. There have been a spat of articles recently about how VCs, tech bloggers and other socialmedia influencers determine which friends to accept. Some accept friends willy-nilly while others, like Fred Wilson, only accept close friends and family. My own strategy is to accept and maintain only those friends (up to 500) who I would stop to chat with if I was running late somewhere. The absolute number is dynamic since I make new, interesting friends on a weekly basis and some friends fall out of favor over time. As the number of fb users continues to exponentially increase, fight friend inflationary pressure, which can potentially devalue your social networking currency.
