New report from PEW (link here) came out with some great data points on who is using Social Network sites like Facebook and MySpace and why they use them.  When presenting Social Networking as a valuable online strategy I’m often confronted by traditional marketers being skeptical about adults usage of Social Networks.  Well, if you where ever in doubt — take a look at these numbers:

PEW Data

Growth in Social Networking Sites

Go check out SproutBuilder.com right now.  Don’t even bother reading this post — go and start playing.  Sprout Builder let’s you very easily and quickly make some very cool widgets for iGoogle, MySpace, Facebook, or anywhere you’d expect a Widget.

This is an extremely cool application for a couple reasons:

• Widgets can be very powerful marketing tools and this ap lets you play around with the possibilities without paying a dev shop to make a custom ap for you.  Figure on paying $25m to $100+m for a custom widget.
• More important than the service that Spout Builder provides is the ability for the site to provide this type of interaction in a web page.  The entire notion that web pages are static information can be thrown out the window — web pages are APPLICATIONS.  This is a great example of that.
• As marketers we need to keep pushing the technology to provide the fullest potential to the business.  We can do that by stop thinking of our web sites as just marketing communications tools, which they are and always will be, but to also start to think of our web sites as extensions of the products and services we offer.

So do this now — go build your own custom Widget.  After that site back and take a long look at Sprout Builder and think about how far web pages have come in the last 5 years.