Conventional teen wisdom: once your parents embrace something, it is no longer cool. So, inspired by a recent Facebook friend request from my mother, I am boldly declaring on this blog that Facebook is so over.

With Facebook’s rapid growth, (More than 200 million active users), it was only a matter of time before it reached a critical mass and spread to the squares… and even the technology-impaired, like my mother.

The numbers back this up. According to the Inside Facebook blog, the number of Americans over 35 on Facebook has nearly doubled in the past two months alone, now compromising 30% of users. Of those, the fastest growing demographic is women over 55. Pulling back a bit, there are now more users old enough to have kids (ages 26-65) than there are kids (ages 13-25 – Facebook forbids users younger than 13) on Facebook.

Will the adult presence on Facebook have a chilling effect on the lewd behavior conventional wisdom says teens chronicle online? Perhaps. And if it’s no longer safe for a teen to post compromising photos of alcohol consumption and obscenity filled wall-postings, where will they turn for their daily debauchery? Twitter perhaps?

Perhaps not, according to Reuters’ MediaFile, Twitter’s recent rise in popularity is due to adults:

But Twitter devotees are grayer than one might expect: The majority of Twitter’s roughly 10 million unique Web site visitors worldwide in February were 35 years old or older, according to comScore.

In the U.S, 10 percent of Twitter users were between 55 and 64, nearly the same amount of users as those between 18 and 24, which accounted for 10.6 percent of the total.

CNET News staffer and social media commentator Caroline McCarthy had some interesting insight into “social media’s hidden bubble” this week. “As the recession rapidly sucks the momentum out of Web 2.0's heyday,” she writes, “with it may go one of the era's most defining terms: the job title ‘social media expert.’”

I certainly welcome a thinning of the social media expert herd, if not the outright extinction. Social media expert has become a meaningless title, as the only qualification one seemingly needs for the label is a Twitter account and Facebook profile.”

Judging from Caroline’s anecdote, that is enough to fool some companies.

One digital-strategies czar at a small media company told CNET News that a while back, before she was brought on board, her employer had enlisted a freelance "social media expert" to give the company a presence on Web 2.0's most buzzworthy communities. It was a disaster, she said. The consultant charged $200 an hour for what was effectively a bunch of Facebook fan pages and a Twitter account that most full-time staff wasn't particularly sure how to use. The final bill tallied almost $40,000.

Of course, the web is filled with hundreds of examples of companies using Facebook and Twitter effectively to get their message out to the masses. However, success takes an engaging product and a healthy respect for the community. After all, authenticity in the Web 2.0 world is and always will be key (see the migration of users from Friendster to MySpace to Facebook, as I commented here).”

There is also that little consideration if the product is geared toward the 2.0 world, as one astute observer opined:

Even now I read blogs on respected websites giving advise (sic) on how to make the most of social networking without any consideration for whether a company's market is even actually present on those social networks, let alone whether the effort helps achieve high level marketing goals.

I fear that social media experts are the new SEO experts, who, in turn, were the new snake oil salesmen...