My mom is a Baby Boomer, and I don’t really think she could be labeled as an early adopter of technology. She teaches elementary school and uses the computer in her classroom probably better than most teachers (she made a blog for her kindergarten class one year and had the students post a sentence each day about what they learned). But my mom doesn’t really participate in social media on a personal level, and in fact, she’s pretty skeptical of it. I’m pretty sure she’s never heard of Twitter or LinkedIn, doesn’t subscribe to any blogs, and definitely, definitely doesn’t want anything to do with Facebook. She’s wary of posting personal information online and thinks that Facebook is “something that you young people do.”

But a over a year and a half ago, I started creating our family tree on a site called Geni.com. You can create profiles for members of your family tree and invite them to join. If they do, they take over control of their profile and can then add additional family members. My family tree now stands at 500+ members, stretching back to Tipperary in 1816. Each family member can add photos and videos to their profile, edit personal information, and post messages to other family members’ pages. If it looks like a duck, and quacks like a duck…

My mom and her siblings love Geni. They post birthday greetings, anniversary messages, and comment on pictures of relatives’ kids. My mom’s oldest sister has really gotten into it and added scanned images of birth, death, and wedding certificates of some of our first ancestors. She’s connected with our third cousins twice removed (Geni calculates those weird relationship rules for you) and added all the family genealogy data that previously was scattered around on a dozen different paper trees.

My mom is all over this “family” version of Facebook. She doesn’t view it as social networking; maybe because it’s a little more controlled and she knows that only her family members will see her profile. But she’s actively participating.

The PEW Internet & American Life Project recently published a report on Internet usage for American adults. According to the report, 19 percent of online adults aged 45-54 have some sort of online profile (Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace, etc.) and only 10 percent of online adults aged 55-64 have one. These numbers are increasing but the report shows that by a wide margin, social networks are, as Brian Solis puts it, “still a phenomenon of the young.” The report also indicates that 60 percent of adults restrict access to their profile so that only their friends can see it.

My extended family’s online presence seems to mimic the age splits in the PEW report. Most of the cousins in my generation have multiple social network profiles and have joined Geni, but we all prefer to connect to each other through Facebook. We post pictures there, send birthday greetings to each others’ walls, and connect and share family news. Many of my cousins are fairly open and don’t restrict their profiles.

Family members in my mom’s generation use Geni for all the same purposes, but almost none of them has a Facebook profile. In many cases, Geni is their only online profile, and they’ve set it up so only members of our family can see it. I’m not sure if my mom is intimindated by Facebook or just thinks it’s not for her, but I’m wondering if Geni will serve as the “gateway drug” for her to branch out and start accepting social media more openly. We’ll see.