According to the ‘Social Media Revolution’ video from Socialnomics, 96% of Generation Y or Millennials (born between 1980 and 2000 or thereabouts) are part of an online social network and yet the fastest growing segment of Facebook is females aged 55-65 years old.

Ashton Kutcher and Britney Spears have more Twitter followers than the entire populations of Sweden, Israel, Switzerland, Ireland, Norway and Panama, and half the mobile internet traffic in the UK is for Facebook. Over 50% of the world’s population is under 30 years old and email is considered old technology by a significant number of them.

We are connecting, communicating and revealing personal and professional details about ourselves more openly than ever before. In the time it takes to read this post around 50 hours of video will be uploaded to YouTube, the world’s second largest search engine.

We tap out information about ourselves at the stroke of a key and yet rarely think about the damage that can be caused to our reputation, both online and off, by posting careless remarks and images.

Even if we don’t write the words ourselves, others are writing about us, and in this digital age of instant upload it’s worth remembering that the camera is always rolling, the microphone is always on, and there’s no such thing as ‘off-the-record’.

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It had to happen, and this week it did. I finally experienced ‘Facebook Fatigue‘.

Social networking might have become the biggest single activity on the internet, but I’m definitely starting to feel overwhelmed by the mass of social networking sites I’m encouraged to join on almost a daily basis.

Hardly a day passes without being invited to ‘Join me on … ‘ (insert whichever social networking site comes to mind). The problem is, for an increasing number of these sites, I can’t get a feel for how they actually work without signing up for an account. ‘Create your profile’ they say, without showing me anything except a sign-up or log-in page.

It’s not just public sites either. Significant numbers of businesses and face-to-faced networks have created online networking portals. All of which add to my ‘Facebook fatigue’.

Whether it’s a public site or private network, if I sign-up and become a member the pressure’s really on.

Navigating my way around the site and sorting out all the privacy and other settings that need switching on or off requires a level of intuition and understanding I don’t seem to possess. Read the rest of this entry »