Online Boom

First, check out this quick blog post from USA Today. According to the article, 2009 was a "booming" year on Facebook for baby boomers -47% of the boomer generation maintained an active profile on the social networking site. In 2008, that number was just 32%. Twitter was another story - only 13% of baby boomers utilized the tweeting site. While statistics show a bigger percentage of younger generations are on social networking sites, the market for baby boomers is obviously growing.
(If you are one of those 13% on Twitter, you'd better check out this article from CNN that reports phishing attacks on the site yesterday. The article recommends that you change your password ASAP, and that you always look closely at links that could be masquerading as Twitter.com in an attempt to steal your information.)
This all leads me to the other interesting story today from Time Magazine's "Wellness" blog (and Reuters) that discusses a new study that shows that people who compulsively browse, chat and play online have higher rates of moderate to severe depression than people who aren't compulsively driven to use the internet." This study leads me to think about a few questions: is "internet addiction" a real thing? And - is it really spending time on the internet that causes depression - or do depressed people tend to spend more time whittling away on the web? What do you think?