Boomeon: The Social Network and Online Community for Baby Boomers

Between 1946 and 1964 approximately 80 million people were born in the United States, of which roughly 65 million are still alive and presumably kicking – the Baby Boomers.

Yet when Bill Murphy, himself a Baby Boomer, started looking around in late 2012 for a community site and social network that was aimed squarely at his demographic, he couldn’t find any that brought everything to the table he was hoping for – and the concept for building Boomeon was born.

Murphy quickly assembled a team that had years of experience in designing, developing and growing online startups, and together they started hashing out some of the key features that Boomeon should have that would set it apart from the rest of the pack. Those features remain on Boomeon, and many of them are not only good practice but promote a model that’s beneficial for many web designers and developers.

Boomeon, for example, is built over top of Foundation, a Responsive framework that when properly utilized allows designers and developers to build a site that resizes and rearranges itself automatically based on the device and dimensions at which a user is viewing it. Designing and building Responsive is a sound strategy for all developers, given the growth in mobile traffic to sites – but was especially important for Boomeon, since many users in its intended audience would struggle with the microscopic text sizes on mobile devices if Boomeon didn’t resize itself.

Next was a requirement that pages be as simple as was practicable in their design. This requirement was put in place so that users would not be overwhelmed with more information than they could handle – and had the added benefit of making the Responsive design requirement easier to achieve. It also allowed for an elegant use of whitespace in the overall design, which presented a refreshing change from the noise and chaos of many sites.

It was also recognized that Boomeon needed to be something different than just another Facebook. Baby Boomers, after all, were already heavy Facebook users, and – well, Facebook already does Facebook pretty well. What Facebook doesn’t do, though, is provide a way for Baby Boomers to find and consume original content that’s just for them alongside the more traditional social networking tools for a user to self-publish their own content.

To that end Boomeon started looking for Baby Boomer writers who could provide content centered around issues relevant to Boomers, and quickly curated a group of professional writers with expertise across Boomeon’s top level categories of health, lifestyle, money and relationships. These writers publish one or more articles a month on Boomeon, and the melding of that kind of content with the self-published content from users has made indeed served to differentiate Boomeon from Facebook and other social networks.

These kinds of requirements all reflect in various ways the core philosophy of the management team that Boomeon is – and will always be – a work in progress. Boomeon has a focus group of users with whom we interact and from whom we seek advice and feedback, and we use the input from that group to help us plan our roadmap for future development.  We also spend a lot of time as a team thinking about where we want to take Boomeon, and new ways in which we might get there.

As just one example, Boomeon will soon begin testing out the concept of online seminars and classes led by our expert writers as a way of adding value for both our users and our experts. We believe it’s that kind of “value-added” thinking and approach that has been a hallmark of Boomeon since its inception, and that contributes to both our current and future successes – and it’s a way of being and of operating that we feel just about any business or web site operator would do well to consider.

We invite everyone to come and check out what Boomeon has to offer, and to share it with your Baby Boomer friends and family. And although we are of course a community for Baby Boomers, many people who are not of the Boomer generation will still find a lot of great content on topics that are actually timeless and will appeal to people of all ages.

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