Two years ago, you could easily see that most of the social networking sites had a very specific age demographic. MySpace and Facebook were essentially the property of high school and college students. About 20 months ago there began some interesting changes in who was registering as a Facebook member. The fastest growing groups of people starting on this service were 50-65 year old women. Since then Facebook has grown to over 400 million members (twice the size since 2008!). It seems that almost everyone is on one of these social networking sites…

Almost everyone, except middle aged men (people much like me, as it turns out…). I should mention, as a form of disclosure, that I have a Facebook account (and have had one for several years). Nonetheless I understand why so many of my friend cringe at the thought of having to enter this world. I have a lot of friends who are less than interested in joining something like this. I know a lot of the reasons too, such as the sometimes plausible criticism that these sorts of sites tend to trivialize many aspects of personal interaction (with a paper trail, as it were…).

Now, there are likely many thousands of forty something men out there who really enjoy playing Farmville (I also know a couple of these people too…). I point is not to cast aspersions upon Facebook and its members, but rather to attempt to show those who will not willingly join Facebook that there are some equally simple alternatives.

As I mentioned yesterday, I will soon be embarking upon a ‘Pepsi challenge’ regarding some of free blogging sites out there. This will certainly not be a complete evaluation of everything that is out there. For instance, there are some micro-blogging sites (such as Tumblr) which seem to fill in the area between a conventional blog and a service like Twitter. If you are interested in putting breaking news out there…these sorts of sites are for you.

I will be t4esting out some of the major blogging services and try to show you (and hopefully, a lot of forty something men) how simple these blogs are to set up, customize, and run on a regular basis. I will also attempt to convince you that a simple blog is nearly the same thing as Facebook (but in a better way!).

If you have a blog, you can automatically add in your Twitter tweets, as a matter of fact you can even have a tweet automatically generated whenever you write a post to your blog ((more on this later…). If you have a moribund Facebook site, you can have every blog post you write automatically sent to this site (which will allow you to interact with any and all of the friends you have on Facebook… the net result to this is that you can ‘have’ a Facebook site without actually ever having to visit it!

With a blog you can subscribe to your site with any RSS reader, and then get every post that you write without having to deal with Facebook, or, for that matter, even you blog. Any pictures you have on any of the online photo sharing sites can be used in any of your posts. One of the big problems with Facebook is that you don’t have as much control over the actual ownership of this sort of property. On a blog…you are the master of your domain…

So, with a newly set up blog you can write whatever you wish, as well as have the ability to post any of your pictures (even slide shows), and all this without having to see whether any of your ‘friends’ are playing Farmville.

As a bit of a summation of what the advantages in blogging is, I should mention (read my previous post about virtual real estate…) that having a Facebook site is certainly a worthwhile thing to have (it only takes a few minutes to set up…), and then you will be free. As far as running a blog goes, you don’t even have to let anyone know that you have a blog…you could set it up as a personal site which allows you to keep track of all kinds of things (local weather, sports schedules, your pictures, you can even add the ability to use IM clients and even Skype on a blog!).

It’s worth thinking about…

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