Is marketing age segmentation dead?
My sister-in-law Ella and husband Moshe came over last night for coffee. Moshe and I sat outside on our porch, so he could smoke his cigars and we rambled over a bunch of topics, private networking,  online banking and the Israeli stock market.  Moshe grumbled about his stock broker not knowing about customer segmentation and how he used the same investment policy with all his clients.   A few anecdotes like that and I realized:

Facebook doesn’t segment friends

There is an outstanding presentation from a person in google research discussing this very point – a lack of segmentation in social networks:
http://www.slideshare.net/padday/the-real-life-social-network-v2
Almost every social networking site makes 4 assumptions, despite the fact that there is ample evidence that they’re wrong.

1. Your friends are equally important
2. Your friends are arranged into discrete groups
3. You can manage hundreds of friends
4. Friendship is reciprocal and equal

 
In fact :

1. People tend to have 4 – 6 groups
2. Each group has 2-10 people
3. There are strong ties and weak ties.
4. Strong ties are always in the physical world are < 6
5. Weak ties in a business context are  < 150