Almost two years ago now, Mom and all her friends started signing up for Facebook. From there, colleagues, bosses, neighbors and others started creeping into the social networking site, once the exclusive playground of the Web's young. For better or for worse, Advertising Age's Michael Learmonth says, social networking is no longer a youth phenomenon. In fact, he says, Facebook, with 52 million U.S. users and 170 million worldwide, is starting to look "like America." As of January 2009, more than 50% of Facebook's users and 44% of MySpace's users in the U.S. were over age 35, according to comScore's …

Kara Swisher has more on CEO Carol Bartz's plan to sweep house at Yahoo. "This is going to be a full-scale peanut butter recall," joked one of her sources, referring to the infamous "Peanut Butter Manifesto," which was sent to the company a few years ago by former exec Brad Garlinghouse. That memo exposed Yahoo's problems, saying the company's products were spread thin like peanut butter on toast. Part of the problem, the memo said, was that Yahoo suffered from a top-heavy management structure that made it slow-moving in making decisions. Swisher says that Bartz is likely to impose a …

Bebo recently unveiled some "spiffy new features" prior to being rolled into a new division of Time Warner's AOL. CNet's Rafe Needleman talks with the president of the new division, Joanna Shields, about the long-term strategy for AOL People Networks. Shields was originally brought in by Bebo's investors to package and sell the company, which she obviously succeeded at (Time Warner bought Bebo for $850 million last year). Now, she's sticking around to make sure the investment pays off for AOL. "Clearly a lot of people...are curious about her plans for doing so," says Needleman. The People Networks group includes …

Yahoo today is expected to unveil new targeting tools that use search and behavioral data to target graphical ads across its sites, The Wall Street Journal reported yesterday. The Web giant is also working on improving the targeting capabilities of its search ads by allowing advertisers to buy text ads that are targeted to users during certain times of the day or based on factors such as age and gender. Other companies offer similar services, but Yahoo has the ability to deploy these targeting techniques across its user base of hundreds of millions of monthly uniques. "Targeting a site with …

The precipitous decline of print "isn't just about the economy, and it's not going to suddenly get better when the Dow finally starts chugging upward again," says Michael Learmonth. Indeed, in a world where everything can be read online for free and anything is fodder for countless aggregators, the printed word is surely out of place. Meanwhile, the walls seem to be closing in on print publishers even faster, as the world stares into "an economic abyss" from which there's no visible way out. So what do (some) media companies do? They start crying for micropayments, ISP taxes, pay wall …

If you want to cover startups well, it's not good enough to simply follow the money, writes TechCrunch stand-in Sarah Lacy. You have to be able to distinguish between the "pioneer money" and the "lemming money." Here's the difference: "By the time the lemming money is investing, the story has been told, and the pioneers have already picked their bets," she says. Right now, it seems, the "pioneer money" has shifted away from Silicon Valley and towards emerging markets like China, India and Israel. More money is still being invested in the U.S., but this is "lemming money," Lacy says. …

It's great that the Web is an interactive medium where everything can be measured, but it doesn't do an advertiser much good if you're measuring the wrong thing. And the click, Advertising Age's Abby Klaasen says, is exactly the wrong metric for many advertisers. In the Web world, credit goes to the last ad clicked on. As Klaasen explains, "brand-focused sites such as NYTimes.com and MarthaStewart.com and even social-media sites such as Facebook and MySpace lose credit because they are often not where a consumer will see that last ad." This leads to diminished revenue for these Web publishers. According …