In a recent Pew Internet & American Life Project report, internet users in the 18-53 year old age bracket (as at 2009) represent a higher proportion of internet users, compared to their numerical percentage in the general population.

“Older boomers” aged 54-63, make up 13% of the general population and are on par, constituing 13% of internet users.

The “Silent generation” aged 64-72, who make up 9% of the general population, amount to 7% of internet users.

The “GI generation” aged 73 and older and are 9% of the population, only represent 4% of internet users.

Likewise, when it comes to media consumption, Twitter users tend to be more savvy with a high proportion reading their newspapers online or on cell phones or smart phones.

Unsurprisingly, internet users who don’t use Twitter are more likely to read print newspapers.

Attempting to demographically target older internet users might have see better efficiency through old guard media, while Twitter is an ideal medium, especially for the 18-53 year old demographic.

Likewise, similar consumption patterns are seen when it comes to accessing blogs and video news.

However, a group of “ambivalent networkers” are emerging from these groups – internet users who are otherwise savvy about using mobile devices and social networks, but conflicted about being connected 24-7.

“Social media fatigue” could be a by-effect of the volume of 1-on-1 communication that social media affords and having blackberry-like continuous communication coming through multiple social networks can be overwhelming. With the possible outcome of some otherwise net-savvy users going “off the grid” and going “social network” cold turkey.

If you’re like me, you might’ve given up on going to sites like MySpace, Facebook or even Twitter as frequently, with the hundreds of pending friend requests or a bursting inbox, creating a stressful, rather than pleasant social experience.

One possible solution: social network-focused meta search engines and more intelligent filtering technologies.

Else, there’s the very possible outcome of social networking devolving into the online equivalent of satellite TV’s “1,000 channels, but nothing to watch” syndrome.

With an estimated 700,000 new users joining the social network each day in recent weeks, it appears that Facebook has achieved critical mass.

Raw numbers don’t tell the entire picture though.

Anecdotal evidence from affiliates suggests that the FB Ad review team are working doubly hard to slap down new ad campaigns in response to user complaints. In particular a common refrain is that new campaigns which are similar to existing campaigns are being rejected.

This is happening while older ads which seem to violate the current (some say arbitrary) rules that the ad review team has set down, are free to run. So there’s a double standard being applied, with some affiliates resubmitting their rejected ads over and over again in hopes that a more lenient reviewer will approve the ads.

One interesting fact from the InsideFacebook piece is that more than 70% of the new Facebook traffic coming on-stream is happening outside the United States.

This means that savvy affiliates would have planned, if not scaled up the frequency and intensity of their Canada, Australia, United Kingdom and New Zealand campaigns. Since there’s no sense trying to fight against the flood of complaints against dating ads and acaiberry ads from US FB users, why not move to greener pastures?

At some point, Facebook will have a day of reckoning, especially since there isn’t a significant amount of mainstream brick-and-mortar advertisers who recognize and take action on this new platform. Until that happens, Facebook will ultimately rely on affiliates to boost its ad revenues.

I’ve spoken to a number of affiliates who say they turn off social networks like MySpace during their content network targeted campaigns because the conversions can be very poor.

With MySpace setting a $0.25 cost per click, you’re going to have to look at an offer payout of at least $2.50 (if not, a higher payout) to make it worth your while.

What might work on a social network might be a lead generation zip or email submit offer and if MySpace’s demographic targeting works as promised, it could be a goldmine for smart affiliates.

You can check out MySpace MyAds.

The advantage of a tabbed interface is that you’ll gain more screen real estate and your content should be categorized more efficiently.

Although having used the original single page layout, I prefer the old format:

Which gave a friendly, personal feel, compared to the more ‘corporate’ feel of new interface.

At the moment, Facebook has an option for users to switch to the older format, which is a better fit for its traditional college/university demographic.

If the new ‘corporate’ look is intended to give Facebook a leg up in competing with more B2B-focused networks like LinkedIn, it needs to still remain in touch with it’s core audience and provide the option of the old one-page format.

Would it have been better to create a parallel “Facebook Business” network and launch the new profile there?

I’m not sure, but I don’t appreciate how the new format has cut up my old profile with the applications laid out the way I want them.

For the moment, the new facebook is not hot in my books.

Aside from being hit with 100 friend add requests from strangers and another 500 application invites, Facebook is a manageable social platform, especially since their moderation filters block out users who sent out a large volume of private messages and the number of friend add requests are capped each day. (Although it’s common to see innocents get caught in the crossfire).

So it was a pretty rare occurrence to see this on a friend’s wall (the defacto “bulletin board” for facebook users to send and receive public messages).

Given that most accounts have to go through some level of verification and you have to manually add friends (who then can post messages on your wall), I was curious to see what the message was about.

So heading over to the blogspot page, I saw:

Which is a little weird to see a Facebook login page on a blogspot domain?

Not really, until you see that the blogspot page does a URL redirect to a third party domain.

I would assume that entering your Facebook login details will parse your login name and password into a third party database (high probability that they will not have good intentions for your account).

So what mayhem can someone wreak with your hijacked account?

If you’re running Facebook ads, they could possibly run advertising on your dime.

They could also go on to spam marketing messages on other users walls.

If left unchecked, this could seriously degrade the quality of the Facebook network.

I doubt that there will be much damage done, given that Zuckerberg’s admin team keeps a tight rein on the walled gardens of Facebook.

However, losing access to your network of friends and contacts can have incur quite a bit of time to rebuild your network. Worst still, it could negatively affect any personal or business relationships you might have with your friends.

If anything, I’d check the address bar to verify domains before keying in account login information.

Forewarned is forearmed.

In a post on Facebook, Leonard reproduced the suspension notice:

Hi Leonard,

Brett
User Operations
Facebook

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This doubtless caused on uproar on Tyler’s facebook application BattleStations where Leonard is active in game development and on the discussion boards (as well as being the public face of BattleStations).

His “infraction”?

Posting a link (accompanying a movie review) to a trailer for “Wanted” on a discussion board.

Apparently, Facebook is getting pretty serious with it’s ‘walled garden’ concept – that you should do all your stuff within the Facebook.com domain.

If you haven’t had a chance to look at the Facebook “terms of service” that Brett was refering to, click on the “Terms” link at the bottom of each Facebook page.

A number of the terms look pretty nefarious. For example:

• “harvest or collect email addresses or other contact information of other users from the Service or the Site by electronic or other means for the purposes of sending unsolicited emails or other unsolicited communications;“

“Unsolicited” is a relative term. Even if you’re marketing and building a prospect database, all it takes is one allegation and your facebook marketing efforts can be derailed. I am a member of FB groups where I receive almost daily updates. At what point do these become “unsolicited”?

• “use automated scripts to collect information from or otherwise interact with the Service or the Site;“

Again, your FB app could be construed as collecting information (I think we call this “analytics”). Seems a little too broad-based for my liking.

• “upload, post, transmit, share, store or otherwise make available any videos other than those of a personal nature that: (i) are of you or your friends, (ii) are taken by you or your friends, or (iii) are original art or animation created by you or your friends;”

Those “funny videos” off TV or cable or satellite you uploaded could get you into trouble.

• “upload, post, transmit, share or otherwise make available any unsolicited or unauthorized advertising, solicitations, promotional materials, “junk mail,” “spam,” “chain letters,” “pyramid schemes,” or any other form of solicitation;“

This step protected FB users from “MySpace Bulletin bombing”. At the same time, I think affiliates and product owners providing a relevant service could get caught in the crossfire.

upload, post, transmit, share, store or otherwise make available content that, in the sole judgment of Company, is objectionable or which restricts or inhibits any other person from using or enjoying the Site, or which may expose Company or its users to any harm or liability of any type.

“Objectionable” is going to be a fairly subjective criteria, especially if it hasn’t been explicitly spelled out. Would Google’s OpenSocial API be considered ‘objectionable’ if FB users jumped ship to MySpace or LinkedIn because those platforms gave a higher Quality of Service?

In other words, would an API providing cross platform compatibility and leaking traffic from FB to another social network be seen as “objectionable”?

At the moment, aside from pretty broad reaching legal terms drafted by FB’s legal department, the transparency for Facebook developers and users remains an unknown until these boundaries are breached.

Great things about Twellow:

• Categorizes twitter streams by vertical/niche, eg: automotive, movies, blogging, news
• Groups related twitterers together

It’s offset by one major flaw, which unfortunately is tied to Twitter’s current state of development – analytics don’t mean much more than a brute force “followers” number.

The higher the number of followers, the higher you’ll rank in the results, with the net effect that Robert Scoble is ranked first with 28,000 followers, followed by Jake Marsh with 12,000, in the blogging category.

The results are limited by the enrollment of your twitter feed into the system for benchmarking and indexing.

But I’m having serious doubts about using followers as the determining criteria.

Could social networks be the new playground for blackhat marketers?

In the initial stages of Yahoo MyBlogLog’s launch, I know of a number of programmers who automated the creation of new profiles and artificially inflated community sizes and went out to spread spammy marketing messages.

With the current state of Twitter development, what’s to stop marketers from either automating or farming out the creation of a horde of twitter followers, thereby artificially inflating the size of their community.

It’s not secret that a forum with 100,000 registered members with 5-10 active users is pretty much dead. What about a twitter account with 50,000 inactive followers?

I wonder if Twitter will enforce a minimum activity threshold (a number of twitters sent out within a set time interval) like some webmail providers have instituted to continually prune dead and inactive accounts.

Will Twitter be able to present useful stats in the future? Likely, but not in the near future as they’re still coping with growing pains and the resource overhead of third party Twitter API calls, to the extent that pagination (an archive of your twitter conversation) and “replies” (twitter messages that you have received) have been disabled.

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It could be a while before we see Twitter metrics evolve to comprehensive display the time visitors are spending reading your updates (ie stickiness) and clicking through to your links (conversion?).

Till then “followers” could be a proxy for a twitter popularity contest (traffic quality is a big question mark).

Tread lightly. A conservative approach can do more to preserve your social goodwill, rather than making rash experimental stabs.

I was looking at MyBlogLog product manager Ian Kennedy’s post on the recently launched MyBlogLog API.

[also contains video and links to the tech specs of the API].

One feature of the API is that it is “the only API that I know of that allows you to look-up a personâ€s identifier across social networks”

Does that mean a spam marketer using the MBL API can scrape all your social network IDs and populate your twitter streams, MyBlogLog message feed, and spam comment on your Flickr photos and blogs?

If the process can be automated, or the captchas can be overcome fairly easily (I’ve heard of a number of programmers who’ve been able to optimize OCR algorithmns on even massively distorted captchas…)

So if the spam barrage hits you on your web 2.0 accounts,

That would be pretty terrible, unless there’s a verification process involved in authenticating the ID of the person initiating the search…

So let’s keep our fingers crossed that enough safeguard are put into place, so that email “mass marketing” doesn’t become “web 2.0 mass marketing”….

For more on permission marketing, check out the Friday Podcast featuring Aweber education marketing manager Justin Premick.

Jason’s previously been very actively marketing on the MySpace social network and has recently focused his attention to the Facebook social network.

Hear his thoughts on how Facebook squares off against MySpace, which are the other social networks you should take note of (and generate income from).

This is part one of a 90 minute interview I conducted with Jason recently.

If you’re already in the social marketing game, this is a session you need to listen to…

[Note: Part 2 will be released tomorrow]

Related post: $uperRewards Facebook monetization application launched

Initially set up for the business community to network, share contacts and recommend acquaintances for open job positions, it appears the site has been attempting to expand its scope.

It is a presence on the Internet though, with an Alexa rank of 149 and Google PageRank 7.

Some negative points against it include: Adding Google AdSense ad blocks detracts from its corporate image, as has some discussions in its questions and answers section which seems to have devolved into a discussion of network marketing opportunities and online scams.

Add to that the seemingly limited interaction and communication functions and you might have the receipe for a social network which could be a “killer app” for corporate headhunters, but something that merely stumbles along for the rest of us.

Admittedly, LinkedIn has helped me connect with a couple of university mates, but to squeeze some networking juice out of your profile requires some “out of the box” thinking.

Let’s look at your profile:

The first thing you need to do is to change the hideous: http://www.linkedin/in/473YDSJ3U3 profile URL to something like: http://www.linkedin/in/andrewwee.

If you don’t already have a blog, submitted articles or press releases or have a Squidoo lens or Hubpage up, perhaps this will help you rank for your name.

Be sure to include your profile details, including specializations.

Instead of “content developer” or “writer”, here’s your chance to mention that you’re a “direct response copywriter” or “advertorial writer” or “technical writer”.

Besides making your profile more relevant to human readers, the keywords will help others searching for a specialist to find you more easily too.

So you might list your specialities and perhaps get a job offer direct from an employer. But more likely a headhunter will be farming LinkedIn’s userbase for specific profiles for their database, such as “Fast Moving Consumer Goods (FMCG) markeitng specialist”.

Where I think Internet Marketers will benefit more is to find joint venture partners or collaborators who might fill in the missing piece of the puzzle for a project they’re working on.

From the demographics I’ve seen, I’d expect that LinkedIn users would be pretty computer savvy, be technically competent and have a higher education.

To enhance your “findability”, include relevant keywords in your profile so you’ll be more easily found:

Load up on the “groups and associations” and you’ll find others in your community too.

As the profile has pretty limited virtual real estate, you’d probably gain the biggest benefit by adding in your blog and website (and be sure to have a “contact me” link on them).

In the social networking game, I think the adage, it’s not how many people you know, it’s WHO you know, still rings true.

Network long and prosper.

While there’s nothing intrinsically wrong with the practice, I feel that it sets up expectations that the blogger or website owner will have to deliver on once the visitor lands on your page.

If you can keep your readers happy, you’ve laid the foundation for a successful and low cost (possibly free) traffic generation model.

The sad reality is that more than 90% of the sites using such techniques have average (and usually sub-standard) poor content.

At best, this is gimmicky in my opinion and best used for one-off, throwaway adsense-oriented traffic.

But if you’re a serious Internet Marketer in this for the long haul, you’d do much better to build your brand, which means either using your photograph, or an image which represents your online presence.

Iconic Avatars: Michael “GrayWolf” Gray, Jim Kukral, Rasheed Ali, Robyn Tippins, Todd “StuntDubl” Malicoat, Shawn Collins, Chris “Drinkbait” Hooley, Jeremy “Shoemoney” Schoemaker.

Credibility and reputation are essential to your long term success, and being consistent in your online branding build rapport with your visitors. Consistent branding will bring you intangible returns in the way of joint ventures which will net you much more than merely driving traffic to an adsense-optimized site.

I don’t know about you, but it would be difficult to take some aspiring marketer who uses a Hooters girl as his icon, seriously, much less consider a joint venture.