Wired Magazine for this winner on Jeff Taylor’s plans to launch a standalone website for memorial tributes:

Monster.com Founder Starts Social Networking Site for the Dead

That is just too good to pass up. Anyway, as Wired reports:

Tributes.com is scheduled for a soft launch in June. It aims to provide a central location to house online memorials for those who have passed on. It’s starting with $4.3 million in funding, with The Wall Street Journal as a lead investor.

Jeff is the founder of Eons.com, which had an initial focus on death notices that some found a little creepy. Tributes.com goes down the path pioneered by Legacy.com, which lets the bereaved post online memories of loved ones. Wired also notes that online tributes have taken off at sites like MySpace and Facebook.

The move by AARP into online social networking that I wrote about last October is complete. The site’s Community section is live, and AARP officials at the What’s Next Boomer Business Summit this week in Washington, D.C. say it’s off to a good start. Since I first wrote about this move by AARP, the competitive threat from Eons has eased off, with traffic there falling back sharply. AARP still seems game to make a go of it. Conference-goers at a workshop on social networking seemed generally befuddled about the topic, although a fair number raised their hands when a panelist asked how many are on Facebook (perhaps a sign that Facebook isn’t long for this world?).

The top three topics discussed at What’s Next this year: caregiving, social networking and financing longevity. Author Gail Sheehy gave a preview of the book she is researching on caregiving, which promises to change the national conversation on this topic. Sheehy spoke at length–and will be writing–about her own experience as caregiver for her husband, legendary magazine editor Clay Felker. The narrative-style book she plans to write will be a breakthrough compared with most of the dry stuff available now on caregiving.

What’s Next is a pre-conference for the gigantic Aging in America conference staged by the American Society on Aging and the National Council on Aging. I’m at that event this week and will have lots of posts–including video on this site and over at RetirementRevised over the next couple of weeks.

Television networks are slowly waking up to the importance of grown-up viewers as their audiences fragment and decline. They’re affluent and more loyal to legacy media…or so they thought. Turns out adults are getting tougher to reach through traditional channels according to a Multichannel News report. Citing research from Wolf Resource Group, the article notes that adults 25 to 54 spend more time online than do younger demos–even though the kids are thought of as the Internet generation. Other highlights:

• 42 percent of YouTube’s audience is 35 to 54
• 30 percent of Boomers participate in user-generated content–although just 10 percent create content themselves
• Adults age 35 to 49 are the biggest users of digital video recorders–31 percent use them at least once a week, compared with just 26 percent among 18 to 34-year-olds.

Marketers will miss out if they rely only on traditional legacy media to reach lucrative Boomer audiences–especially as younger Boomers edge into the 50+ category.

The new issue of JWT Livewire focuses on Boomers and interactive media, and includes several articles about 50+ social networking. I wrote an overview article for the section looking at the business underpinnings of sites like TeeBeeDee, Eons and other 2.0 sites. I’ve posted a PDF of the article, Facebook for the 50+ Crowd. Other contributors to the section include Eons founder Jeff Taylor, and TeeBeeDee founder Robin Wolaner.

I recently ran across a good interview with Robin at Beet.TV. Not brand new, but offers good insights into her thinking about TeeBeeDee’s strategy and potential value.

BusinessWeek takes a look at social networking sites for Boomers, zeroing in on Eons and TBD. The verdict: TBD “gets it” on Web 2.0 strategy and implementation, and Eons doesn’t. Eons, BW writes, is “reminiscent of another web era,” with big-time venture funding, tv advertising and market research; TBD, by contrast, relies much more on the gut sense of founder Robin Wolaner and staff–with plans to iterate as they go:

That’s much the way some of the most successful Web 2.0 startups, including Yelp, Digg, and Facebook, were born. TBD is a lot like those companies in other key ways: It’s housed in a dingy, anonymous building in San Francisco’s South of Market district. Desks are scattered around a wide open space, there’s a buzz of activity, and everyone is dressed casually, many in TeeBeeDee T-shirts. The only difference: Almost everyone working there is over 40.

Which underscores another key Web 2.0 hallmark: authenticity. Every great social networking site was built by someone the community can trust and relate to. Early on, college kids and recent graduates could identify with Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. And what early MySpace hipsters didn’t have a little affinity for the ubiquitous, automatic first “friend,” MySpace co-founder Tom Anderson, even if he was lying about his age? Building a site by listening to hundreds of thousands of vocal members is hard work, but the more a site is built for you and your peers, the easier it is to understand what they have to say.

My Sun-Times column on TBD and other Boomer 2.0 sites is here. You can read my Q&A with Robin here.

I’ve launched a new monthly column in the Chicago Sun-Times called 50+Lifestyles, focused on business and consumer trends in the Boomer market. The column complements the paper’s 50+Lifestyles section, which is a cooperative venture of the Sun-Times and 50+Digital. The first column looks at 50+ social networking, and features an interview with Robin Wolaner of TeeBeeDee.