Just when Grandma was getting into Facebook...

Several weeks ago, at the urging of several friends and co-workers, I ended my unofficial boycott and joined "The Facebook Generation."

While I was impressed at the easy-to-navigate interface, the ability to reconnect with people from my past and share the "excruciating minutiae of daily life," I didn't find it to be as addictive or life-changing as many of the zealots predicted.

I was, however, shocked at how quickly dozens of people my age and older decided to take the Facebook plunge right around the same time. Suddenly, it seemed, every yuppie in the world was updating his status and "friending" a bunch of Facebook newbies.

It got to the point where I heard about senior citizens, many of whom could barely turn on a computer or read an e-mail a few weeks ago, were signing up in order to share pictures and keep track of children and grandkids.

And then, you hear a shocking story like this about the New Berlin Eisenhower student who used Facebook in a bizarre blackmail / sexual assault scheme that has devastated dozens of lives and will likely lead to a blitz of publicity and a long jail term.

That got me to thinking ... just when you thought it was "safe" for Grandma to discover the wonders of Facebook and the Web in general, something like this happens. You know it's going to be a deterrent for many people.

(For years, my own mother was leery about ordering things online. That changed when I convinced her that it was riskier to give her credit card to a waiter in a fine restaurant than it was to order merchandise from a secure site.)

It will be interesting to see if the New Berlin incident slows the momentum of the Facebook revolution among baby boomers, grandparents and other middle-agers.