Social Networking Over 50…

I brought up in my post last Saturday the need for my in-laws to have their Internet connection fixed as they had just switched providers and couldn’t get it working again. My question at the time was, how many in their demographic feel as strongly as they do about the internet? When we think of things that draw people of that age group toward being online, it generally consists of things directly relating to the offline world such as work, and family. While I am sure there are those 60+ year olds out there who have their own MySpace page, I’m fairly certain it’s not as common as those between the ages of 13 and 45. However, this may soon change. A UK site aimed toward the over 50 crowd has created their own community that requires you be half a century or more to join.

Boasting 13,000 to date, the oldest of which being an 87 year old from Ireland, the site aims to provide older netizens with a community of their own. They even provide a space for members to blog now. What I found most interesting what the layout of the site. It is bright, clean, well spaced out with large fonts and headings, and a line of ad space sequestered to the right hand side (most of it centered around saving money or the community itself). It even uses the not as common as it should be ability to make the text even larger if you find it’s too small and it is denoted by the simple phrase, ‘Text too small?’. You can see this is in contrast to the small, tightly compacted MySpace layout littered with blinking ads and member pictures. The difference being a site that is easy to navigate and relevant to it’s users versus a site that tries to play to everyone who’s purpose tends to get lost in the process.

I am excited to see a site like this in place and am eager to find out if there are more (in the US maybe), and how they compare to this one in terms of design and member numbers.