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Facebook users over 35 double in number in just two months, and more stunning data

Women over 55 comprise the fastest growing demographic on the social networking site formerly reserved for college students.

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Computing | by Samuel Axon | Thu Mar 26, 2009 2:11PM | 2 comments

When Facebook was first started, it was only available to Harvard students. It was later opened up to all college students. Then came high schools. Finally, everyone could join. And join they have! It used to be that Facebook was made up almost entirely of people between the ages of 18 and 25, but according to the latest statistics they're now in the minority. There are more people aged 26 - 65 than there are college-aged members.

The times, they are a-changin'. The biggest growth demographic is – get this – women over 55, and the number of users over 35 has doubled in just 60 days. It would seem that Facebook's no longer a hangout solely for the young elite. A similar phenomenon occurred on MySpace (though far less pronounced) a while back and it could be argued that that helped to cause a large defection of young people from the service. Will Facebook's 20-somethings run to Twitter (which is seeing its own amazing spurt of growth), or will they stick around?

Your social networking community of choice is in for some big changes, and we're not talking about a new homepage layout!

This story around the web:

Trusted sources:
external link Number of US Facebook Users Over 35 Nearly… [Inside Facebook]
external link Techmeme: Number of US Facebook Users Over 35… [techmeme.com]
external link Facebook is getting old fast -… [tech.blorge.com]

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Comments (2)

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Brent G (7:09 PM on Thu Mar 26, 2009)

Seriously, that is pretty stunning. My 55+ parents actually just got a facebook profile even though they don't use it. Haha, and I'm not the one that told them to, so it must be pervading their friend groups.

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facebook applications external link (10:38 AM on Tue Nov 24, 2009)

Great news for facebook, as well for the society. College goers are saturated on facebook, if aged people pick up then facebook will match the uniques of google/yahoo.

No doubt, young or old, online social networks if or not facebook improve the social life of anybody.

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