Facebook and the second wave of social networking
I’ve noticed a lot more of my friends joining Facebook recently. This got me thinking about technology adoption curves and the spread of technology (I admit it: I’m a geek).
A number of people in the “blogosphere” have noticed the same, especially that you’re looking at the demographic moving towards us “older folk”. The early adopters in this tech wave was in the 14-25 year old demographic. Even more, I think studies are going to find that the first wave of social networking users were skewed towards the lower end of that age group. Yet, as both the early adopters and the technology matures, you’ll see that first wave move towards other technologies or change their habits on they use the existing stuff. And that how people use the technology will change as people in the older demographics finally figure out just what those darn kids have doing all this time and start to “grok” how to use social networking.
So where am I going with all of this? Think back to the early lead held by MySpace amongst the social networking sites. Think about the reasons why NewsCorp spent so much money purchasing MySpace. Now look at how the demographic is changing. People are starting to figure out that’s social networking is more than just a bunch of teenage girls talking about the latest boy-band. Looking at the recent MySpace site redesign makes you wonder of the marketing people at NewsCorp understand that change is a-coming?
Selah.