DETROIT (Free Press)- John Samuels does it every day.
He leans on his leather sofa, snaps open his silver laptop and logs onto the social networking site Facebook.com. On there, Samuels, 26, known as Bravo to his friends, often gets posts from a certain woman who tells him she loves him. Or comments on a tattoo. Or asks him to buy her a Nintendo Wii.
She is not a crush. Or a girlfriend. It's Terri Johnson - his mother. Who is 51.
"When I first saw her on Facebook," says Samuels of Detroit, chuckling, "I thought 'Oh, gosh! We have a spy in the building.' "
It's not just Johnson. She's part of a rapidly growing population of Facebook users whose age bracket transcends the high school students, college kids and twentysomethings who define the Internet Generation that first crowded social networking sites.
In its four years of existence, and particularly since it opened up to anyone with a valid e-mail address two years ago, the phenomenon that is Facebook has cut across generations and added a different dimension to how people communicate, build relationships and reconnect with old friends. This year, Facebook has overtaken MySpace as the most popular social networking site worldwide, with more than 150 million unique users.
The global growth for Facebook has been explosive. According to Internet research company ComScore, Facebook had 154 million unique users in August and MySpace had 120 million unique users. Six months before, in February, Facebook had 100 million users to MySpace's 108 million users.
The older demographic might initially have logged onto Facebook to check on their kids, but they stay on because of the easy dialogue it offers. Nearly half of Facebook users - 46 % - are 35 and older. (The site, created in 2004 by Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg when he was a 19-year-old sophomore at Harvard University, was originally limited to college students.)
"People are inviting older brothers, parents are getting involved, grandparents are getting involved," says B.J. Fogg, who runs the Persuasive Technology Lab at Stanford University and is editing a forthcoming book called "The Psychology of Facebook." "There's one great party going on in the Internet, and it's Facebook."
The fact that older users are coming to the party mirrors what happens with many such technologies that start out with youth and gradually move to the mainstream, but Facebook has a broader appeal than most social networking sites.
"Facebook," says Lipsman, "is particularly good at being hip and cool for the young while being pretty simple and having functionality that works for the 30-plus crowd."
LinkedIn, which targets professionals and is more of a site that connects people with each other's resumes than as a source for entertainment, has a 35 and older user population of 67%. Twitter, a rapidly growing site that allows people to update their friends constantly with what they're doing and that can be hooked up with Facebook, has a 35 and older population of 52%.
Facebook allows people to post pictures of themselves, tag friends in photos, graffiti people's walls, send messages, post video, join groups, play games, expand their network of friends and "poke" each other.
What also makes Facebook unique is its ability to add applications. Fogg recently taught a 10-week class on Facebook in which his students created applications that could send kisses, find profile matches and play the classic computer game "The Oregon Trail" with other Facebook users. One of Johnson's favorite applications lets her gift friends with digital Coach purses.
Through photos, videos or a couple of typed lines, called status updates, Facebook allows users to instantly tell their entire network of friends - often numbering in the hundreds or thousands - what they're doing or how they're feeling without worrying about spamming people.
"You can check out several people at once without having to try to call to everybody to see what's going on," says Johnson, of Northville. "It's really easy to see who's updated their profile that day."
Avid Facebook user Sara Grivas of Livonia says she sometimes finds a rawer honesty in Facebook status updates than she would face to face.
Grivas, 45, logs daily Facebook time checking on the teens she works with through her church and her Christian youth ministry, Darkness by Default.
"Because you're not confronting the person, it's safe," she says. "As a youth minister, you're just always monitoring the kids. This is one more aspect of them allowing you into their lives. Through Facebook, you can get to know their family and what kind of friends they're hanging out with.
"I can see when they're having a bad day by their status. It certainly has a huge impact on my prayer life."
One of the most attractive - and addictive - aspects of Facebook is the appeal of resurrecting friendships.
Katrina Mitchell, 38, of Oak Park, had been dreaming about, of all people, "my very first boyfriend from kindergarten."
So Mitchell typed his name into a Facebook search and found him living in California.
"I messaged him, and he was like 'Oh, hey! How you doin'?' " she says. "We had lost touch, and I was able to reconnect with him. We were talking about a friend that we had grown up with. I hadn't seen her, I hadn't spoken with her, and three months later, she showed up on Facebook!"
Fogg says Facebook has made itself "the most convenient and the most trusted way of staying in touch with your friends and building new friendships."
Convenient because the interface is simple and easy to use. Unlike MySpace, which gives users the option to design their own pages with HTML code, the consistent blue-and-white look of everyone's profile, says Fogg, doesn't make a user "look bad because I'm not pimping out my Facebook page." He adds that the convenience tradeoff is worth the potential sacrifice of individual creativity.
Grivas says a big reason she prefers Facebook to MySpace is its dearth of porn or skanky images. She also likes that Facebook allows her to give a thumbs up or thumbs down to its advertisements and elaborate on why she did or didn't like them.
Though Fogg cites a potential downside of Facebook as substituting site use for meeting with people face to face, he does say Facebook would make him more likely to want to visit old friends in person.
"They don't have to say, 'Oh, what have you been doing?' " he says. "It would be, 'Oh, I read on Facebook that you're doing such and such.' They've tracked into the momentum, and it's going to be much more fun."
Facebook facilitates fun with virtual Coach bags and connections, but professionals have latched onto Facebook's uber-networking potential for business purposes, too.
When he's not laboring as a crane operator, Samuels works as a party promoter. He spends about 16 hours a day with his Gateway or Sprint Touch logged onto Facebook, pumping up the next hot spot and searching for new friends.
"I'll just go on a group, like Eastern Michigan, and I'll just add constantly," he says. "As a promoter, your main goal is to have the biggest database."
Johnson has joined Facebook groups like Special FX Makeup Art to get tips for what she should do as makeup director for her church drama team. She queries people in the group, for instance, about how to make brutal-looking burns and scars.
Her family, though, has been central to her experience on Facebook. Aside from Samuels, her two other children - one lives in Chicago - log on regularly, too. So does her sister, who lives in New York.
Johnson is even Facebook friends with several buddies of Samuels, who specifically requested that she add them.
The result is fodder for some friendly blackmail.
"Every time I say something to them," says Samuels, "The first thing they say to me is, 'I'm gonna tell your mother. She's only a click away.' "
Erin Chan Ding, Detroit Free PressIn your voice
