Social
Networking
for Grownups
Look out, kids! The heyday of Facebook may be officially over, because your parents are starting to use it.
The Facebook demographic has been skewing older for several years, but recently some astonishing news broke: the number of women over age 55 using Facebook has increased by 550 percent in just the past six months. What on earth is going on?
Well, more people are using Facebook to reconnect with family, old friends, and classmates, and it turns out that people who have been out of school for a while have pretty large social networks to track down. More professionals are using social networking sites as a means of maintaining business as well as personal contacts. And maybe-just maybe-parents of teenagers are intentionally signing up for Facebook and MySpace just to embarrass their kids.
So what's a person to do when they don't feel comfortable letting their parents in on the latest drama club gossip? On Facebook, you can customize your settings to bar certain users from seeing your wall. MySpace allows you to distinguish between your friends, the public, and users over 18, but it's not quite as flexible.
Either way, the easiest way to juggle personal and professional, private and public, is to do one of the following: 1) just don't post any photos or comments you wouldn't feel comfortable having your boss/grandmother/neighbor see, or 2) set up separate professional and personal accounts and direct people to the appropriate account.
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