What you see above is my Facebook profile. I don't know why, but when I got my first invitation to Facebook back in September, I just ignored it. I thought I was too old. In February, I started to get more and more invitations from people I knew, so I decided to flesh out my profile. So, been tweaking and haven't much blogged much about it, in part, because of an experiment. This experiment was to hang back and see what other folks are doing. I'm working on a blog post with a guest author and some of this enters my thinking. A Bob Dylan song keeps floating into my head. The times, they are changing ... but more about that when I get some good reflection time.
Anyway, when I heard the cool interview that Holly at NTEN did with Marshall, I had to drop everything and install the splash application and it gave me a few ah ha moments.
One of those moments happened a few weeks ago when Clive Thompson was speaking at the Games for Change Conference. It was a late afternoon session and I was brain dead. But a few points he made really stuck me. And, of course, none of this will make sense to you as I don't have the words for it.
He was talking about writing a book about games, but said he didn't want to do that for another 15 years. He talked about the difference between his Wired readers and NY Times (wildly paraphrasing here). He went into a bunch of game jargon and explained in an excited tone of - I don't have to explain those terms to my wired readers. On the other hand, for an article in the NY Times I have to and he did a brilliant step-by-step of context setting ending with "I'd have to explain electricity." And he ended with, "It's better to wait 15 years until they are dead."
So, as someone who is eligible for ARP, I feel this weird kind of generational shift. Maybe I'm making too much of it ..
Well, happy July 4th!
I've had a similar recent "ah ha" moment about Facebook, too...and I have about 1/10th the number of Friends on it that you do.
Us older folks are supposed to be on Yahoo and LinkedIn, no? But I find I'd rather see what's happening on my Facebook page.
I think it's because Facebook doesn't *look* like it was designed for kids (hello, MySpace). And since you only interact with those folks in your social network, as in real life, it doesn't matter the target audience.
Posted by: Judi Sohn | July 04, 2007 at 05:27 AM
Beth, Thanks for the post about Splashcast... it inspired me to actually install it on my Facebook account. Other friends had mentioned the SplashCast app but I'd not gotten around to it yet. I shared your initial concern about age and Facebook - while I'm not quite AARP age (very late 30's) I'm definitely outside the previous range of FB. However, like you I found that many others were experimenting with FB and so I, too, joined the mass experiment. It's definitely been interesting! (And will no doubt continue to be so.) Anyway, thanks for posting so enthusiastically about the app. - Dan
Posted by: Dan York | July 09, 2007 at 02:29 PM
At Savoy River, we have created a generational profile that will assess what generation you truly belong to based on traits and tendencies instead of by age group.
Visit us at www.generationalprofiles.com to take your free profile.
Posted by: Tim Harris | July 20, 2007 at 08:47 AM