It was obvious to me that something had changed when almost overnight, old friends of mine from before my involvement with all things cyber began showing up in droves on Facebook. After years of my trying to lure them into online communities, they almost spontaneously appeared, friending me and uploading photos from those days of yore. These are largely fellow Boomers, whose generational presence on Facebook had been almost as rare as their presence on MySpace.
Was it just me? Or was this part of an overall growth spurt for the platform (which I still find to be less of an engineering marvel than a scramble of hit-and-miss social interface experiments)?
Ben Lorica of the O’Reilly Radar provides some partial answers on their blog. Turns out, the growth in US users – though accelerating – is not increasing as rapidly as it is in Europe and Asia. But how about growth in my older age group? Not too shabby, according to Lorica’s findings.
Europe and South America continue to add teens (13-17) and college-age (18-25) users at a faster rate than North America. Compared to my post in December, North American growth in the 45-54 age group jumped from 47% to 88%. Facebook continued to post strong growth among working age (26-65) North Americans with the share of users in the 26-54 age bracket increasing from 39% in early December, to 46%.
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