Will Facebook become ‘Uncool’? Does it matter?

Advertising Age posts some data about Facebook and MySpace becoming more evenly populated by the generations.  What was once the outpost of mostly young people (after all, Facebook started as a college-only networking tool), is fast becoming a communication tool for people of all ages.

The largest group now on Facebook is aged 35 – 44, and the fastest growing segment is age 55+.  Don’t have your parents in your network if you don’t want them to hear about that long weekend fling, OK?  Some very interesting inter-generational things going on here.

But is it really ‘uncool’?  Not yet.  The numbers only show that the older generations are catching up.  Facebook is still the #1 Internet destination for college aged people, ahead of Google and Yahoo.  The big numbers are there for ALL generations, so if you target youth, go for it.  If you want to aim at their parents, still go for it, knowing that the proportion you will reach is less than for the young set (but growing).

As always, stay tuned.  This is moving so fast that we could see that sharply UP trajectory for Facebook to turn sharply down overnight as people get tired of keeping up with their online networks.  Or, what might have the same effect, prune them back to what they really wanted in the first place:  a network for real friends only which would be in most cases much smaller, much less ‘viral’.