The Social Media Minute (29-May-2009)

Social media moves so fast, it's hard to keep up. Here are the week's top stories in scan-friendly format:

• Baby Boomers Turned Off By Facebook?
• Google 'Waves' To Unified Social Communication
• Social Media And It's Affect On Corporate Websites
• Twitter May Start a TV Show

Baby Boomers Turned Off By Facebook?

A new batch of data coming out of Facebook is showing that fewer people over 55 are embracing the social networking service. Facebook was very popular amongst this age group at the beginning of 2009, but it seems this popularity has started to wane.

According to the figures, 2.2 million people aged 55 and over visited the site last month, compared to 2.8 million from March 2009. Amongst people we talk to, Facebook "stickyness" wears off because of the constant barrage of polls, surveys, games and other annoying applications used on the Facebook platform.

Where some folks just want to catch up with their social circle, Facebook becomes too noisy and causes these users to a) stop logging into the site or b) close their accounts all together.

Google 'Waves' To Unified Social Communication

At the Google I/O conference yesterday, the search giant unveiled the Wave platform, a unified mashup of email, instant messaging, photos, video, maps and more. Google Wave is a way to pass around documents and conversation around these online assets.

Wave appears to be Google's attempt to bring unification to disparate pieces of online media sharing. That is, why share your photos on flickr, videos on YouTube and blog about a recent trip on a your own blog? Wave promises to make an online home for these previously separate data streams.

Google is still rolling out and finalizing Wave, but the idea seems promising. Google Wave will be open source and relies upon open technologies to empower the service. More details as the service goes live in the coming months.

Social Media And It's Affect On Corporate Websites

Adam Ostrow wrote a very good article on Mashable asking whether social media marketing campaigns are taking importance away from traditional corporate websites. How are social media sites taking away from our own traditional online sites? Some businesses and individuals are giving out links to their Twitter accounts or Facebook Profiles when meeting someone new. Even Google has launched an effort to print business cards that point someone to Google your name to find your Google Profile page.

All these campaigns are great for the social websites you're pointing to, but you might want to think twice about giving out your Twitter handle as your online identifier on a business card. The issue lies in the fact that these social networking sites may go away or diminish in popularity, leaving your profile on a service you don't keep up to date.

Organizations, companies and marketing programs should keep profiles up to date on social networking sites in addition to (rather than instead of) their own corporate websites and identities.

Twitter May Start a TV Show

Twitter, the ever-popular micro-messaging service, may start its on TV show, according to the New York Times. Twitter has seen a boost in popularity and mainstream coverage since Oprah started evangelizing it and Ashton Kutcher gained more than 1 million followers on the service.

According to online news sources, the Twitter TV show will be a series that will have participants competitively follow celebrities for our entertainment purposes. This sounds very vague and draws images of everyday people chasing down celebrities and tweeting about the experiences to their online Twitter followers.

However, since the news of the Twitter TV show has broken, Ashton Kutcher has threatened to abandon the social networking site altogether if this type of show is brought to air. As many know, Kutcher uses Twitter as a way to fight back at the papparazi that constantly follows him and wife Demi Moore around.

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Tags: facebook, google, google wave, social media, social media minute, social networking, twitter

Social media moves so fast, it's hard to keep up. Here are the week's top stories in scan-friendly format:

• Baby Boomers Turned Off By Facebook?
• Google 'Waves' To Unified Social Communication
• Social Media And It's Affect On Corporate Websites
• Twitter May Start a TV Show