Facebook Is No Longer the Most Popular Social Network for Teens
slate.com
slate.com
Still, it's very significant that Facebook is not the go-to thing for lots of online connective tasks (even if they do own Instagram). People don't want all their interactions to be on one platform for the same reason no one puts all their eggs in the same basket, and in addition, there are nicer baskets out there to try out!
You can only really compare Facebook with services like Google+, Myspace, and Orkut; and even then, many people have active accounts on multiple of those services.
Not really. Twitter is just as good for identity as Facebook, if not more so, since they can more easily verify identity with mobile accounts, which is how most people access twitter.
On top of that, they have a lot of engineers working on how to parse messages with slang and code. So even though there is not purpose-built UIs for events and picture sharing, Twitter and Facebook both solve the same need for 3rd parties.
This means Facebook has essentially reached utility status, which is reflected anecdotally in my life. It's replaced email for a generation. But that's arguably a fine place for them to be: if you own the entire backbone of people's communications, there's a lot of money to be made in that. You'll find a lot more teens who use Facebook but not Twitter than the inverse.
To put it another way, if asked I'd say Hacker News is "more important" to me than Google Search. But Google definitely makes a lot more (potential) money off me.
The focus is on the content, not the user.
Is it really bookmarking? It seems so different than, say, Delicious is/was.
1. Line works with your telephone number (if you have someones number you can send them a message)
2. Line allows you to send messages (free sms) and voice calls.
3. Line allows you to have friend groups.
But there also reasons specific to Asia (at least Thailand):
1. Line has a "cute look" and has smilie packs which you can buy (big images actually). Thais seem to love that. Westerners would probably find them childish.
2. Line has status messages. These seems to be used in quite an interesting way: to tell people something which you don't really want to tell them directly, e.g. "Stop being jealous. Change your life to make other people jealous.".
I never saw a need for any of them. Twitter had potential, but it got overrun by people who somehow felt the need to rant about their opinions on political decisions without being completely educated about any of them, by celebrities, by people who can't spell, and by people who think that @messages are the perfect way to privately communicate on the internet.
I really don't see Snapchat lasting for longer than a year. The others will stay around for a while, but then eventually fade into irrelevance... like all trends that don't provide palpable services, e.g. Google et des autres fournisseurs de recherches.
Do teenagers spend money online? Is there any research on that?
They use websites, apps, and txting.
I'll predict that a couple of years from now, the main population left on FB will be 60- somethings who once again are at a stage in their lives where they can afford the time for it.
Truthfully, I don't know why there isn't a K-12 social network that has schools and teachers, and kids were grouped by class, and teachers could moderate all posts and (have the option to) see all messages (with a notice to the parties that it had been looked at). That would alleviate any concerns I had about inappropriate content, and online bullying (there's a record, kids would be accountable for what was said), and provide immediate benefit to students and parents (who could maybe have accounts that were read-only for public discussions and their own children's correspondence).
Edit: As numerous replies have pointed out, there apparently is one, edmodo.com. I guess it's just not used around (or at least not in my district).
Kids might also want and indeed use other social networks, but I would feel much more comfortable as a parent telling them no if I knew they had this to fall back on.
I've seen a large implementation (around 1/3 schools in my area) that technically could do all that, but you can only 'mandate' a horse to the water but can't make it drink - in the end, they were used for parents to look up grades communicate with teachers, while kids used only the absolutely practical things rarely, and since they couldn't be mandatory (as not 100% can afford a computer at home) it sort of died out. It would be fun to ask the developers what percent of kids sent even a single message to another kid... All at the same time, the ten year olds are extremely active online elsewhere.
Beyond any moral or parent protectiveness issues, Facebook, Google Plus and Instagram all require you be at least 13 years old to use their services. My (very limited) understanding is that TOS are in some cases legally enforceable now, so letting kids use those sites is problematic from my perspective.
Does such a system have a single practical benefit to a teacher doing their job, that they couldn't / wouldn't do better offline by simply talking to the kid at school after the lesson? It's a benefit for the parents, and they got the daily status information (attendance, grades, discipline&other issues) flowing quickly and easily from teachers to parents, that part worked.
What would you expect from a teacher buy-in there - individual assistance with the homework online in the evenings ? My imagination is failing me here :) The original post sort of implied that it would be the place where you'd want kids to move their communication between themselves, no? (and they wouldn't avoid any important communication in any place moderated or monitored by their parents, naturally)
In any case, teachers pretty much everywhere tend to be overworked and underpaid; as much as they want to chat with a few kids individually they are already doing it in school. However, if you're (for a random example) teaching math to only 6 groups of 30 pupils each, then if you'd spend after hours 5 minutes weekly on online communication for each student, it would come out 15 hours per week, on top of handling homework - it's simply not going to happen.
I think so, as long as the scope is clearly defined. You are right in your later implications that it could easily be subverted to a tool making more work for teachers, and I was erroneously drifting down that path.
> What would you expect from a teacher buy-in there
Listing homework for the night
Listing upcoming longer term assignment dates
Noting any information that students/parents should be aware of
Sending important announcements to students/parents
Addendums to lesson plans that they forgot to cover or came to light later ("Joey brought to light that I might have been unclear or misspoke when I was referring to the Spanish inquisition. What I should have said is that 'No one expects the Spanish Inquisition!' That should help you complete your History of Monty Python unit tonight.")
An official way to send a message to a teacher outside of class
I receive emails from one daughter's teacher on a regular basis, at least twice a week, because she hates the school website software (I hate it as well, it's horrendously bad). The other daughter's teacher has emailed maybe once, to confirm the address. I assume all her updates are going to the website, I haven't seen them. The teachers are all very responsive to email though.
> The original post sort of implied that it would be the place where you'd want kids to move their communication between themselves, no?
No, just that it is a place they could communicate between themselves, with some other benefits and a heaping level of oversight. My daughters would use it because 1) They aren't on any social networks, 2) they don't have any email addresses I know of (I'm not discounting that they don't have any, but I doubt it at this point, ask again in a year), and 3) we don't have a land line, just cell phones, so she doesn't have a lot of easy ways to contact some of her friends.
> In any case, teachers pretty much everywhere tend to be overworked and underpaid
Agreed. I'm all about using technology to make life better and reduce work, not create more work. When I'm referring to teacher moderation, my original thought was more along the lines of the teacher being able to research and see message history of a student when actively searching. If someone complains they are being bullied or targeted, that shouldn't be any more acceptable in the online system as in the classroom. I think kids need a safe place to learn this.
As a replacement for a class website, I think it would have quite a bit of potential.
Your daughters wouldn't (couldn't) use it the way you imagine, because, face it, the 'critical mass' of other kids who'd they want to talk to simply wouldn't be on such a system online/active/quickly responding as they are on facebook/snapchat/whatever.
And I'm not sure if any classmate communication forum with a heaping level of oversight is realistic - the nature of teens and pre-teens is such that any must-be-part-of social activities would happen elsewhere; and if all the good stuff is elsewhere, then they don't need/want to use the monitored forum.
That is why the TOS are all what they are.
So essentially, no one uses it as a social tool. I doubt young children would be that interested either. It would be hard to take seriously as a "fall back", either. The real fall-back is email and SMS.
At least when I was her age, I didn't want to pass time where teachers were.
I've come out of the cave just a while ago. Children are sneaky little demons.
I highly doubt the veracity of these numbers.
(emphasis mine)
(emphasis mine)
A difference of ~3 points in a group as fickle as teenagers isn't very significant.
Compare that to twitter's new onboarding experience, which is (arguably) very well done.