I just read a great post on Mashable that breaks down the characteristics of Twitterers (see the pretty graphs here). The analysis is based on several sets of data and makes intuitive sense.

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The WTIA event on Social Media last night (June 24th) was a fun event, with some general information that was semi-helpful. My five take-a-ways include:
1) Social Media is hot, hot, hot. Not a shocker, but there were ~300 people there. Every conference that I have been to in the last year that has a social media track or session has been PACKED.
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Squidoo.com is a social media community created by Seth Godin (UI Simplicity Guru for those who don’t know) that is built around “lenses” which are easy to build, one page topic sites within the Squidoo community. Squidoo is different from Facebook, LinkedIn and MySpace because you can create a series of lenses (pages) that is a different topic on each and relate them to each other, off site content and your profile. It’s kind of like a hosted blog, but easier to get going and, well, different. There are lots of good tips, ranking capabilities and search capabilities. Squidoo boasts over 800,000 unique pages, but Google only shows 114,000 in a site:*.squidoo.com search which makes me wonder how well the site is crawled.

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In my quest to understand social networks better, I just read an article in the Feb 12th issue of New York magazine which I found very interesting. The underlying premise is that the under 30 generation that is the driver in the growth and sustainability of social networks is OK with giving up their privacy in order to gain an audience and that this is creating a true generation gap not seen since the early days of Rock n Roll. You can read the full article here for yourself but here are some points and thoughts:
1) I think she is right about the privacy angle. While the older gens tend to be highly concerned about our images, personal space, right to no phone solicitations and desire to be left alone, the younger gens are willing (and able) to expose much more of themselves to public scrutiny. Some of the reason may be that at 22 yrs old, there is not a lot to lose while at 40+ with a family and kids and a house - there is more on the line. Another reason is that the younger gen hasn’t found their groove in life and having pictures, diaries, friend circles, etc. means that they are better connected than just a college, high school or neighborhood cirlce. The internet is huge after all.
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