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Jakarta Post

Old join young in social networking craze

Not only young people, but older ones have also joined the social networking craze, which is now expanding not only in Jakarta but also in the country's major cities

The Jakarta Post
Jakarta
Tue, June 1, 2010

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Old join young in social networking craze

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ot only young people, but older ones have also joined the social networking craze, which is now expanding not only in Jakarta but also in the country's major cities.

According to a survey conducted jointly by TNS and Yahoo!Indonesia, about 57 percent of respondents who were more than 40 years old had accounts in social networking websites.

"If we talk about social networking, we often start to think about younger people. It's not necessarily true. You now have older people which get into social networking. It's not really just for the young anymore. It goes beyond," business director and group head of TNS Indonesia Karthik Venkatakrishnan said in Jakarta on Monday.

He said that internet users now prefer using it for social networking rather than merely for trading messages.

"Social networking has edged out the traditional functions of internet such as emailing and sending messages. It has become the most dominant medium for interaction and communication among people," he added.

"In our previous research, the sending of email and messages was higher than social networking. But this year, we see lots of changes. Social networking has become much bigger than message sending," he said.

Social media especially social networking, he said, was actually changing the rules of engagement within the use of the internet. "Social networking actually has become the big thing now," said Venkatakrishnan.

According to 2010 research, about 68 percent of respondents used social networking to interact with their friends and families; 59 percent to re-engage with their old friends; and 56 percent to upload and share pictures.

The research was conducted in greater Jakarta, Surabaya, Bandung, Medan, Semarang, Palembang and Makassar in December 2009 through January 2010. It involved 2,300 respondents for a general media survey and 1,500 for an internet media survey. The respondents were male and female and between 15 to 50 years of age.

According to the research, mobile internet had developed momentum with a higher number of new internet users using this kind of new communications technology.

"Internet cafes have lost their leading position to the mobile internet which has become the main point to access to the internet," Venkatakrishnan said, adding that the population in major cities tended to use mobile internet rather than accessing internet at home.

He said internet users working from internet cafes fell to 64 percent in 2010, a 19 percentage points decrease from 83 percent in 2009.

"About 48 percent of users are accessing internet from their mobiles. It's a huge change. Previously they accessed the internet in internet cafes. But now they start to access from their mobiles," he said.

According to the research, he said, online news also replaced print media news for the readers, especially for entertainment content. He said that 37 percent of internet users accessed online news in 2010 as compared to 28 percent in 2009.

"The use of print media as news sources is continuously decreasing," said Venkatakrishnan, naming the two most popular entertainment content targets for online news readers - news blogs (49 percent) and music and films (38 percent).

Meanwhile, Yahoo!Indonesia country editor Budi Putra said this year's new trends offered various opportunities to increase the number of domestic internet users.

The research showed that internet usage was growing far beyond greater Jakarta.

"Jakarta still remains the largest single focus in terms of the number of people using the internet," he said, while mentioning that the growth has been slowing down compared to other cities such as Semarang, Palembang and Makassar.

He said that Yahoo!Indonesia would continuously enrich its local contents. (ebf)

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