All kidding aside, for those of you who can’t decipher our headline, my mother-in-law is now on Facebook — and apparently she is not in the minority. Facebook now has 150 million members, and its fastest-growing demographic are people age 30 and up.

What makes the social networking site so popular for the elderly? (Just kidding, my MIL is only 54). A recent article in Time, Why Facebook is for Old Fogies, takes a tongue in cheek look at that very phenomenon.

As the story suggests, most of us are too lazy (and too old) to remember e-mail addresses, we like the concept of adding another networking tool to our business arsenal and it’s a captive audience to show off pictures of ourselves, our kids and our grandkids doing the cutest darn stuff.

Plus, you have to sign in to participate so its only as intrusive as you allow it to be, you can vindictively turn down friend requests from people that were mean to you in high school, and you can enjoy America’s favorite pastime — voyeurism.

Facebook is only five years young, a good deal younger than the bulk of its users, and its power grows exponentially everyday. They currently have more than 175 million active users, and that average user has 120 friends on the site (cool, I have 287 friends — that’s good right?)

More than 3 billion minutes are spent on Facebook each day (worldwide) and more than 15 million users update their statuses at least once each day. Beyond that, what are we Facebooker’s Facebooking about?

There are more than 850 million photos uploaded to the site each month, more than 5 million videos uploaded each month, more than 24 million pieces of content (web links, news stories, blog posts, notes, photos, etc.) shared each month, more than 2 million events created each month and more than 20 million active user groups exist on the site.

Does all this Facebooking amount to anything more than a colossal waste of time?

As my girlfriend friend in Houston said on her status update last week: Margaret has determined that Facebook is the spawn of Satan and an evil procrastination succubus. Translation: Facebook is like crack and a lot of us are addicted.

Your turn to speak.

This entry was posted on Monday, March 2nd, 2009 at 3:21 pm and is filed under Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.