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"According to new data from Inside Facebook, users over the age of 55 haven't been as actively using Facebook over the past two months after triple digit growth in that demographic earlier this year.  The report has resulted in speculation that while older people are trying Facebook, they're not sticking around.\nBetween November 2008 and February 2009, the baby boomer set (age 55-65) was one of the fastest growing segments on the social network, up 175.3% for females and 137.8% for males, according to the statistics.  But that user boom was short-lived, and those users aren't returning in the same numbers.\nIn April and May there were actually 650,000 less users over the age of 55 on Facebook than the previous two months \u2014 the only age demographic where the site experienced a decrease in users over that period.  Facebook grew by over 4% each month over the past two months, according to the blog's measurements, which are based on data from Facebook's advertiser tools, but its inability to hold the attention of its older users is interesting.\n\n\n\n\nI don't want to generalize, but the problem might be \u2014 at least partially \u2014 a case of needing to better educate new users.   My mother told me in March that she had joined Facebook.  When I asked a couple of weeks ago why she still hadn't sent me a friend request, she admitted that she just didn't know how.  In fact, she has barely used her Facebook account at all, and only joined to try to reconnect with a few high school friends.\nThe reasons for using Facebook are different for older users than they are for younger age groups.  Young people use Facebook as a means of daily communication, while many older users (in my anecdotal experience) seem to use Facebook as a replacement for email to keep in touch with family and old friends.  For that reason, use of the site for people over 55 might be more reactive; that is, those users won't log in every day, but only when they receive an alert informing them of something new to look at.  Perhaps that means we'll see a spike in usage among older users around holidays and other times when family and friends are likely to reach out and send messages or photos.\nImage courtesy of iStockphoto, hidesy"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://mashable.com/2009/05/27/facebook-baby-boomers/>