Mashable had a very insightful post today about the shift in demographics of Facebook userbase.

In my opinion, the facts presented in the post are highly valuable, but the analysis and synthesis could well be furthered.

First, I am also amazed by the explosive growth in older segments compared to younger segments. But here is an alternative scenario. The largest growth figure is realized in "Unknown" row of age brackets, as 2.5m people flocked into this category in the last 6 months. Were new members in the last 6 months overly secretive compared to existing members? I wouldn’t say so. Yet, in the last 6 months, there have been substantial discussions on Facebook’s privacy policy and I would expect a sizable portion of members to get more concerned about their data lying inside Facebook. So, what if those 18-24 people who seem to be not growing at all (a mere 5% increase) have chosen to remove their age data and become an "unknown"?

Anyway, that doesn’t undermine the value of the Mashable post. So let’s move on to a discussion avenue with potentially higher strategic impact for us all.

It is generally way much easier for humanbeings to conceive new information in "descriptive evaluation" mode. In everyday language, that means an analysis explains "what happened". I guess that is how our brain works in default mode, as we have tremendous stress in ourselves to give meaning/reason to things that have already occured. Yet, we do a far more terrible job at synthesizing the facts to turn into a "prescriptive insight", which is simply something we can use to achieve some important objective in the future. The change in Facebook’s demographics could be used as such an insight as well.

What we see in relative growth figures of Facebook’s demographic segments is almost the textbook application of Technology Adoption Lifecycle. Geoffrey A. Moore, author of Crossing the Chasm, provided the foundations of user behavior when faced with discontinuous innovation. Today, a serious cross-section of business world (entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, strategy consultants…) are trying to predict how the adoption behaviour will be realized for a particular product or service. They are building models, extrapolating growth figures, and benchmarking other projects (such as data on walkman, ipod, cable tv etc.) to come up with a forecast. Yet, the data is here. The demographic segment data in Facebook is sufficiently large and mainstream. An intelligent entrepreneur (who is trying to build a consumer-facing start-up) should lose herself in the Facebook demographics data pool and eventually she will have a good understanding of how her own technology adoption cycle will happen. In my opinion, giving this valuable data (not the data at a point in time, but letting people grasp a time series of this data) is almost equivalent as letting go your trade secret. But as it is already out there, entrepreneurs should make use of it.