Facebook's Faces Head Toward the AARP Zone

(MoneyWatch)  This headline should jump out at anyone who still thinks Facebook is for people decades away from having crow's feet: "Women Over Age 55 Fastest-Growing Group On Facebook." That Mediapost story went up early this morning, and though the 717,000 55-plus women that make up this growing group still represent a teeny fraction of the social network's 150 million users, expect that number to be comfortably into the millions within months. Facebook is reaching into the AARP zone, wrinkles and all. Per Inside Facebook, which just released an intensive demographic breakout of the social net's users, the female 55-plus demo has grown by 175.3 percent in the last six months, and growth rates for slightly younger, more well-represented demos continue to showing healthy triple-digit percentage gains as well. Facebook's technology, of course, gooses the process, facilitating the expansion of the so-called social graph among new demographics by continually recommending new friends to users. I've been watching this slow demographic creep unfold among my own circle of Facebook friends for the past several years, and it's fascinating to watch different communities within my life come onto the site in waves, almost in lockstep with broader statistical data on how the site's usage is changing. When I first joined roughly three years ago because I was writing a story about social networks, I felt incredibly out of place as a soccer Mom hanging out among the teenagers. I couldn't find anyone who looked like they were within two decades of my age.

For me, the true aha! moment in the power of Facebook has come in the last few months, when my high school and college friends, who have nothing to do with the social networking business, suddenly began to populate the service, and not just to keep track of what their teenagers are doing online. They are posting pictures, sharing links and writing on each other's walls -- doing many of the things earlier adopters to Facebook love to do. None of us are in our 50s yet, but let's just say we're not far off. There's no reason to think this behavior won't be duplicated by those who are even older than us.

In fact, it's possible that once the AARPers have adopted Facebook, they'll hold onto it at least as tightly as those who are younger than they are. Maybe you're past the mate-and-date stage at that point, but the older you are, the more communities you have been a part of -- there's work, community, extended family, high school and college -- all of which strengthens the glue that makes a site like Facebook work. Even in the last few weeks, I've reconnected with several old friends via Facebook, and decades after the last time I saw the inside of a classroom, rekindling those connections is more meaningful than I ever could've imagined.