too old for Facebook?

June 30, 2007

I’ve been hearing good things about Facebook APIs, so I thought I would register and check it out. I have a policy of not giving out my real birthday information. So, I can remember it, I use the real month and day along with the year my grandmother was born. For the first time after signing up for dozens of sites this way, in signing up for Facebook, the year 1908 did not appear. I wonder… who makes these decisions? 1910 is the first year that appears in their list. I wonder what the discussion was like? “Let’s start at an even year.” “We don’t expect anyone over 97 to seriously use Facebook” Is there some weird limit to the max number of items in a popup list on some browsers?

The oldest living person ever was 122, and the oldest people currently living are all over 110. My 99 year old grandmother is alive and healthy. She’s been using a computer since I bought her a Mac in 1992. Now, I’ll admit that she has been resistent to signing up for Internet access since a stamp only costs 41 cents and she could send an awful lot of letters for the montly cost of connectivity. She’s pretty happy typing letters and her memoirs and printing them. While my grandmother is hardly Facebook’s target customer, it just doesn’t seem right. When I’m 99, if I make it that far, I wonder what new technology created by people decades from now will assume that I’m too old for it.

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