Social networking sites are,  in general terms  websites and software tools which help you to discover, extend, manage, enable communication in, and/or leverage your social network. Whatever that may be. In essence, we are seeing the advent or maturation possibly of online communities where the user really has control of what they do, how they do it, who they interact with and how they interact. Early adopters for this phenomenon seem to be, and we will use Facebook stats as an example and I want you to refer the next piece of info carefully:- 3 million users age 25-34,- 380,000 users age 35-44, – 310,000 users age 45-63 and – 100,000 users age 64+

What you will eventually see though, is the advent or growth of  smaller niched based social networking sites. Thus, I’m interested in the users from 35+. They will have as big an impact as the first group, they are just slower to adopt. But they are just as intent on using the site and are becoming more comfortable with technology in general. Once they do reach a comfort level, money will flow more freely to and from advertisers.  But what can also happen from numbers such as these, is that you can create niche based “micro-sites” for the older users. These sites can speak their language and speak to their interests more. I exclude dating sites because that is a completely different business model.

Social networking sites are as they say, social sites where people can meet, hang out, exchange ideas, thoughts, and can freely express themselves however they feel in a way that best suits them given the tools provided by these sites. So why can’t an older generation(34+) take advantage of this? They can, but developers need to realize that they are out there and waiting for them to speak their language.

By the way, I have bought the URL www.ourspacetoo.com in anticipation of this. If you are ready to address the upper half of the social networking demographic, contact me and lets get going!