It's not just moms ruining Facebook anymore, grandmas are getting in on the game too.The Pew Rearch Center reports between April 2009 and May 2010:

• Social networking use among internet users ages 50 and older nearly doubled — from 22% to 42%.
• Social networking use among those ages 65 and older grew 100% — from 13% to 26%.
• By comparison, social networking use among users ages 18-29 grew by 13% — from 76% to 86%.

 Mary Madden, Senior Research Specialist and author of the report goes on to explain:

Young adults continue to be the heaviest users of social media, but their growth pales in comparison with recent gains made by older users. Email is still the primary way that older users maintain contact with friends, families and colleagues, but many older users now rely on social network platforms to help manage their daily communications.

With the older demographic growing at such a rate, it will be interesting to see how advertising changes to catch this audience. Companies with a upper-aged audience might have to rethink, or in some cases start thinking about, their social media strategy.

A new branded social network, Perfunkt engages gourmands and world-class chefs around original niche content. But while Perfunkt seems to align with its audience's minimalist tastes and plugs into Facebook's Open Graph nicely, the site itself seems a little...well...perfunctory compared to Epicurious and all of the other foodie communities out there.

So what do you think? Is Perfunkt niche marketing cooked to perfection or just another half-baked corporate attempt to concoct a community?

The International Computer Science Institute is about to release a publication entitled "Cybercasing the Joint: On the Privacy Implications of Geotagging." In a nutshell, it explains how criminals can use your geotagged text, photos and videos to plan a real-world attack. With the current internet privacy concerns and location-based services all the rage, this report could provide some useful insight.

The BBC shows Facebook's world domination in pretty graph form.

Beyond that, there is a funny bit in the footnote of this graph: The Nielsen Company doesn't classify Flickr and Twitter as social networks. Which makes me wonder, what does Nielsen classify them as?

After the flop of WebTV, Event-Based Social Networks (EBSNs) might finally create a successful marriage between the web and TV.

It's a simple fact, people watch TV while they're online. Nearly half of Facebook users simultaneously watch TV while socializing and roughly 30 percent of all status updates on Facebook during the England-USA soccer match included a word relevant to the World Cup. Plus, Twitter connected millions of fans during the NBA Finals and the World Cup.

Leveraging these two seperate technologies, instead of trying to make TV into the web and vice-versa, could prove very successful. Popular and growing location-based services, like Foursquare, have given birth to EBSNs like Fanvibe, GetGlue, Hot Potato, Miso and Tunerfish — platforms that offer some type of live event participation through their services. 

For creators of a game that includes trolls as playable characters, Blizzard Entertainment is taking some steep steps to prevent internet trolls. Blizzard (makers of World of Warcraft), Starcraft and other popular games have announced that full, real-life names will be displayed for all posts on their official forums.

Following the announcement on the various forums is 50-60 pages of users telling Blizzard why this is a bad idea. Their main concerns seem to be: privacy (including the potential for stalkers), identity theft, minors (a key demographic for any video game) and common names (there are a lot of John Smiths in the world, and it'd be pretty easy to get them confused).

One person who called Blizzard to complain about the change pointed out that Blizzard themselves don't even give out this much info. It's against company policy for their support reps to give their full name over the phone.

Online forums are a typically seen as bastions of anonymity, but this move by Blizzard makes their forums something closer to a social network, which displays your full name. The question is, will current users be OK with this shift. The amount of negative feedback Blizzard has already received seems to indicate they're not. As one post from eyeball2452 put it, "Essentially, Blizzard has cultivated a community over the past 15 years and now they want to overhaul it in one fell swoop? Good luck..."

Toyota's auto-biography Facebook app shares your story. This is a great example of a company leveraging their brand value to create user-generated content on an existing social network. It's not only a fun way for customers to share stories but also helps Toyota build a library of testimonials, photos and other data. Of course, for this to be effective you must have a brand that people gush about. 

Justin's recent blog post, "Is Your Mom Ruining Facebook?" sure got me thinking. I'm seeing a trend toward more narrowly focused social communities.

Just today I read a series of news posts regarding Fabulis, a recently launched social network for gay men, getting another $250k in seed money, bringing the New York-based company’s funding to $825,000. As people look for a more comfortable social network will they flock to communities focused on a particular demographic, subculture or niche?

If Google is creating a new social network, they're timing it perfectly. Because old people are totally ruining Facebook.

roiworld reports:

Most online teens belong to a social net, and Facebook is still by far their #1 social network. But, a significant amount of teens report "Facebook Fatigue." Among those teens who have created a profile, roughly one-in-five (19%) claim "they no longer visit Facebook" or "are using it less than they did a year ago."

Of those:

• 16% are leaving because their parents are there
• 14% say there are “too many adults/older people”
• 13% are concerned about the privacy of their personal information
• 45% have just lost interest