[sterling]

"It could be written by my 50-year-old uncle who's "in IT"."

What does that mean? Does your 50-year-old uncle exist? I am 48 and I am "in IT" and I work mostly with men between the ages of 21 and 27. Despite their youth, their very long/very short hair, and their t-shirts, some of them are genuine fuddy-duddies (old-fashioned, conservative, set in their thinking, however you want to call it). The chief focus of their conservatism is an almost religious adherence to doctrine, to how things have been so far in their very short lifetimes.

Here's what someone my age thinks: Google has introduced a "service" that politely adds to the annoyance of our lives. If google cared about what users wanted, they would be improving their core business, search, which is becoming increasingly polluted by spam.

[arethuza]

I think there may be a spot, say in the mid 20s, where you become emotionally committed to a particular technology stack and everything else is compared against that reference. So there is quite often quite a lot of stiction there to move to a new stack.

When I was in my mid 20s (nearly 20 years ago) I was developing in Common Lisp and PostScript. And while I am still very fond of those technologies, once I left an academic environment I didn't really have much option but to go for a sequence of, comparatively mundane, platforms.

[Groxx]

(Empirically) statistically, though, the 50+ age group is significantly less up-to-date with internet fads than the below-50 group. Yes, there are exceptions, but a quick glance will inform anyone of the same comparison.

That said, early-20s here, and I'm turning off Buzz. I'm also out of FB. Which makes me one of the oddballs for my age group.

[rdouble]

(Empirically) statistically, though, the 50+ age group is significantly less up-to-date with internet fads

Do you actually have those statistics? I thought the actual statistics were trending the opposite direction:

http://www.insidefacebook.com/2009/02/02/fastest-growing-dem...

[Groxx]

First, I do not have the statistics, though now I have supporting statistics. Such a claim cannot be accurately quantified, so not only can I not ever have such statistics, I only claimed that it could be discovered empirically - essentially, by looking at what is, instead of requiring hard fact.

Fastest growth implies nothing without a scale to start with. If there's one 100+ year old on Facebook, and in a single day two more get added, they've got a projected growth rate of over 70,000% per year. Skewed and unmaintainable statistics are effectively worthless.

Look further down the page, especially at the pie chart showing FB use by age group. 45+ amounts to 8% of users (55+ only 3%). The 18-25 group, which I'm in, amounts to 43% single-handedly.

The 45+ group is growing faster than others because they're years behind everyone else, and typically fewer join at all than the earlier adopters. QED.

[akkartik]

Sorry, I didn't mean to sound ageist. I think you qualify as in IT without the quotes.

I was trying to go for a pattern of people who think they 'get it' because they employ or manage programmers, or are even just surrounded by them.