Eleventh Grade Tech Trends
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Email is just for school and ecommerce. She told me that one of her friends sent her a super long text about a crisis she was having. I said, wait, a super long text? Why didn't she send an email. Laughter ensued. Nobody uses email to communicate with friends, silly Daddy. I guess that's how you get to > 3000 sms per month.
Facebook is out. She feels like hers is the last grade to use it in any appreciable way, and even for them they mostly use it to manage events. Few of the freshmen use Facebook.
I'm currently a senior in college. If asked during high school, I would have said exactly what your daughter said, except with Facebook messages replacing SMS.
At my college, all organization of student groups happens over email. I very quickly went from receiving <1 email/day during high school to receiving ~20 emails/day in college. Exposure to this mailing list culture at college (and also at during internships in industry) has made me an email person. I typically don't send short emails (~2 sentence) for social messages (I use Facebook for that), but if I need to send a paragraph to someone I do it over email. My group of friends splits our planning of events 50/50 between email and Facebook messages.
I'm not sure if this is just at the college I attend or if its a more general phenomena.
But honestly, since I left most events/groups I'm a part of work through Facebook now. Event management with Facebook really is its killer feature as a social network.
Facebook isn't good at events because of event management. It's just because they aggregate all events.
I consistently get invited to events in: New York, Montreal, San Francisco, Buenos Aires, London, and Berlin. This is by choice: If I visit one of those cities, I want to know what to do. But why can't I filter my events view so that I only see events nearby? Why do I have to have a clogged events feedback, because I want to know what's happening if I travel and don't want to hide invites certain event producers?
(Also, event sharing features suck, if you're promoting an event. You have to use Javascript hacks to share, and only then you can share with everyone in one of your top two or three cities.)
I think your use case is very different from how most people use FB events. Though it would be nice to have good event discovery (and they probably have the data to do it).
EDIT: And of course after I submit the comment I realize I know you irl. Sup.
My Mom however, texts with her church friends like it's going out of style. I tell myself this exemplifies my attitude of it being out-of-date. But then I hear that young kids text like crazy, or they use an app that's so close to sms that it may as well be.
Edit: People in college also love collecting "connections" on LinkedIn, although I've only heard of one person using it to land a job/internship.
When I was in high school, just like your daughter, I never used email. It was only to communicate with teachers, shipment notifications, or email updates from my favorite bands.
In college, this largely shifted with the popularity of listservs and email communication with professors.
However, what I didn't expect (and makes a lot of sense) is that, towards the end of college and after I graduated, I started emailing and Gchattng with my friends significantly more. Why? Simple explanation. We were in offices most of the day (internships then jobs), and couldn't be seen on Facebook or on our phones. But, we could have our personal email up in one of our browser tabs and no one would know.
And for better or for worse, teens love their anonymity.
(Meanwhile, here I am, glued to Reddit and HN...)
EDIT: Feel free to ask me anything regarding this, if you're curious. Of course, as a relatively nerdy guy, I don't have the most typical experience :)
I think pseudonymity is perceived in a very different manner than anonymity. With a pseudonym, you can piece together the scraps of information someone leaves and maybe make a good guess at who that account is; at least, that's how one feels when using a consistent pseudonym, even if it's unrealistic. With anonymity, you have no sense of responsibility for your actions, because each one post is unlikely to reveal much on its own.
Again, I probably have a skewed view of things, but hopefully this was at least thought-provoking!
Given how hard Facebook pushes, and has subsequently forced Messenger onto all mobile users, his sister not knowing it exists is not good for Facebook. I'm sure the author is trying to spin it into a positive since he works there, but that's quite a stretch.
I initially felt corralled into installing it but now I use it quite frequently to participate in small group discussions with my friends. Actually, I should clarify: it's almost exclusively one group discussion that we use to organise our social lives (last-minute day trips at the weekends, beers after work, that sort of thing). Email has become fragmented (not universal; everyone has a number of accounts), there is no group option on SMS, and Twitter is too public. There isn't a comparable communication medium in use within my social circle.
I find the app experience pretty reliable and straight-forward. I especially like the option to 'snooze' chats for an hour or two (I'm trying to get some work done and my friends are all telling jokes) or until the next morning (I'm engaged this evening and don't want my phone pinging all the time).
(As it appear to be relevant and give context to this discussion, I'm a late-20s English male.)
It seems entirely designed to keep the high school experience of constantly worrying about what everyone else is doing and thinks about you front and center through the rest of your life. It's like choosing to never move past the most horrible parts of school.
I think this is true if you choose to make it that way, but for a lot of these, it really doesn't have to be that way. For example, I have a small (~10) number of friends on Snapchat; we generally share tiny tidbits of our life that we enjoy, and it helps us to know each other a little better in a manner that doesn't invoke jealousy.
It's always interesting to see what apps they have pinned or what they use the most (snapchat, instagram, twitter). Generally with tech-related stuff I'm the most knowledgeable and up-to-date family member, but I completely miss the train when it comes to social apps sometimes. I think this is because I'm older, geographically isolated from young people, and grew up without a cellphone at all. I definitely had a phase where I was obsessed with joining things ASAP (remember Pownce?), but I feel like I've been done with that part of my connected life for a few years. I use instagram, but don't follow anyone except immediate family members or close friends, I have 0 exposure to the super popular "celebrity" accounts because I rarely use or search for hashtags. I still don't use Snapchat, and recently one of my brothers was shocked that I didn't use Venmo.
A particular thing that I've found really odd is that I have trouble getting a text response from my siblings, even though I know they have their phones on them and are constantly snapchatting, or whatever. I text a lot, but maybe get one response for every 5-10 texts I send.
I think the one extremely consistent app in my family is Spotify, although it's fairly rare for any of us to use its social functions. From my parents down through all the kids, everyone uses Spotify quite a bit.
The younger siblings don't seem to care about or understand data limits as much. To them, the internet is everywhere, what do you mean it's not free?
On text, your absolutely right, text used to be the way to get a hold of the younger crowd, but now I have 9 active chat clients installed, everyone wants to use their own network where there friends or business is. I installed SnapChat, Secret, a few others, poked around, deleted them.
text messaging for kids is what email is for the older generations now. I remember when I first starting email and I thought it was really cool. It was instant communication and I felt like I was living in a brave new world. Nowadays, I almost despise email. Too many messages, or ads, or stuff I get subscribed to, then have to remove or unsubscribe to when they don't mean anything to me.
This is how it is with kids and text messaging now. Unless you're one of their 10 most important friends they text and arrange their social calendars with, you're the equivalent of spam to them. I should know, I have the same experience with my nephews.
Anything about how something went like a sports event, or something that I thought was important in their life? No answer. Even stuff like, "I have two extras tickets to the Maple Leafs game, you want to go with a friend?" will go without an answer sometimes for days. The response? "Oh, sometimes I get so many texts, I forgot sometimes to reply back to people." When I spoke to my sister she said they were starting to have the same problem. Until they took my nephew's iphone away for a week and told him if they text him, it's a priority and he had better respond or lose more of his gadgets or his iphone on a permanent basis. So now they have a way of cutting through the noise to signal ratio and get a hold of him. I just don't have that much pull with them. Now, I usually just call my sister or call him directly. It's the only way I can get a response within a decent amount of time.
This is a function of you being their sibling. I'm 27, my sister is 20, we both chat and snapchat and are difficult to distinguish from teenagers in that regard. But the rate/speed of reply for texts (and other messages) goes in this order and falls exponentially: 1. Besties, 2. Girlfriend/Boyfriend, 3. Siblings, 4. Friends, 5. Acquaintances, 6. Parents, 7. Strangers
I think people are starting to recognize that your social presence catches up to you later on in life, and as a result are flocking to semi-private networks like Twitter (via private profiles), Instagram (again using private profiles) and Snapchat. Using these networks in such a way removes the anxiety of posting to a large audience, and in some cases (Snapchat) you can easily control the audience who sees your posts. I think this is really valuable. The other commonality between these apps is that none of them require your real name - you can choose to mask your identity, or make yourself easily discoverable publicly (especially Twitter). Oh yeah, and none of these apps require that you sign in with Facebook. I think asking for a Facebook login is just about the laziest way to attempt to harvest data about your users, and it's not as though they no longer recognize this (or at the very least, it's yet ANOTHER app asking for you to associate your account with your Facebook account.)
Monetization in apps of the future will rely on creative new ways of associating non-identifying data. This will mean relying more on the information the user generates vs. the information they give us explicitly (Who are your friends? Where did you go to school? etc). It should be an interesting next few years for the big players like Facebook. It's certainly been interesting seeing Snapchat rise to such success with such a simple concept. I think there's a potential to "Snapchat-ize" every major feature of Facebook into many wildly successful apps. Now, what's more important than photos?
> Using these networks in such a way removes the anxiety of posting to a large audience
What I've noticed about Twitter and Instagram is that because they're semi-private it means people get WAY more upvotes on their content. Thus, for a younger generation, they'll flock to the networks where their voice is heard the highest. Kids get sick of "Sally Cheerleader" getting 135 likes and "SOOO BEAUTIFUL" comments from everyone else in their school. As this group ages they'll see the value in LinkedIn/FB when non-anonymity can potentially means real cold hard cash in their pockets and the cycle will repeat itself.
> Monetization in apps of the future will rely on creative new ways of associating non-identifying data.
I disagree. For the last 15 years we've been asking publishers to "get more creative" with advertising. All that means is that Forbes now gives you a 15 second ad before clicking through to it's content. There's nothing creative about that. I do however think many app vendors will start charging for their apps as opposed to relying on advertising in the future.
Related: I want to start a tumblr consisting of photos of groups of people in public staring at their phones. We take our phones way too seriously at the moment.
Also the thing with Instagram following ratios is frightening. My brother talks all the time about following and then unfollowing people to trick them into follow you, it's all an unnecessary popularity game (I guess I was never one to understand popular people though).
It is interesting and the article touches on a reason Snapchat is so popular is because it gets rid of the whole non-judgmental aspect that occurs in FB/Instagram.
There's a lot of weird things that I notice many people do (including myself) related to metrics like this. I'm 24, and a lot of my friends use Snapchat; however, they've switched to using the personal stories over sending actual messages. I really don't like this, mainly because you can see who has viewed your story. And there's a sense of anxiety where you don't want to look at other people's stories if they don't look at yours. So I just avoid it altogether.
Similarly, when I first got Facebook, I never sent any friend requests. So I have about half as many friends as most of my friends have, and over time I realized "number of friends" serves as a surrogate for real-life popularity. There's exceptions; some people deliberately limit their number of friends. But for the most part, those people with 1,100 friends are the social, outgoing, and extroverted whereas those with less than 400 are the weird, introverted quiet people (myself included). So as soon as Facebook released the option to hide your friend count from your profile, I applied it immediately.
I never liked the trend of "trying to be popular" when I was in high school and undergrad, and I like it even less with social media. I wish the newer social networks would design away from concepts like number of followers, and number of likes. It's somewhat disheartening when you post something like "my work was feature on such-and-such national lab's homepage" and it gets 20x less likes than your friend who posts "Shopping at the mall with my friends!!!!"
Really? I never got that feeling. While I do check to see who looked at my story, I always figured people who didn't check either don't use Snapchat on a daily basis or just didn't have the time to see it within the window. I do get your anxiety when it comes to FB's likes or IG's hearts but since Snapchat doesn't have that and is so ephemeral, I don't get any of that.
However, any bullying type posts get downvoted really quickly. Or posts with personal information. The only kind of insults that stay on there are those directed at other schools, or those among the fraternities/sororities.
Actually, I've noticed that when people anonymously post about depression or suicide, the response is overwhelmingly helpful. Other students post links to the counseling center website or tips that helped them personally.
As a decade-old flickr user, I wept. Poor flickr, they coulda been a contender.
Facebook is about as dead as email: not at all.
The reason, I suspect, is that a survey may average out all the trends and observations about specific use cases for services. You start with colors, you end up with gray-brown.
Of course, billions of dollars in valuation are at stake. Facebook and Twitter among others were built very fast and are probably still open to disruption if they are not watching these trends. People are jumpy.
No, it wasn't. I personally don't like sandals. I'd happily give you lots of reasonable-sounding explanations for why I don't, but it's just the preferences of a single guy in the end. Nobody would spend more than a half-second considering whether my personal choice is relevant to the futures of the footware industry.
Yet suddenly because it's the internet and teens, we think the subjective personal experiences of a couple teens is more important than actual data. It's ludicrous, and not at all thought-provoking (except in the sense that humanity's continued inability to think statistically is provoking).
Of course it is relevant. In your case, the footwear industry would like to know whether the general public likes sandals or not, in order to decide whether to make more or less of them, and what types of advertising should be purchased. We can go with the initial assumption that there is nothing special about you, as a sample, and work on the principle that you are representative of the footwear buying public as a whole. So, we now know that not everyone likes sandals, and since we know other people that also hold the same view, we can be confident that you are not absolutely unique. Of course we want to seek out more opinions, and determine more accurately how widespread this dislike of sandals is, but I would be foolish to completely ignore this data point.
Similarly for teens and Internet services, the single data point here is interesting and thought-provoking because we know it isn't a freak outlier, and is instead somewhat representative of teens as a group. Since the actual quantitive information (that is, user retention and engagement at Facebook, Snapchat et al) tells us only what is happening, we must seek out qualitative opinion pieces like this to determine why. Everyone here is capable of understanding the limitations of small sample sizes and self-selection effects, and should be able to control for that. And of course, it's also just interesting to know what ones fellow human beings feel about a subject, and even important when there are business models predicated on these same humans doing things because their friends are. Network effects like that are obviously one of the main drivers for social network adoption, and thus increasing the value of a product.
That's an absolutely terrible assumption. A sample of one is never ever representative.
This isn't "what is your favorite ice cream" which is a purely personal-singular choice. This was "what do you and your friends do" which expands greatly the number of responses.
They're Internet Points: inherently worthless, and they exist to manipulate your brain's pleasure centers.
The time they can spend on improving themselves and their gray areas, they are spending that time on FB and other SNS and wasting it.
As Patja said, email is really a big NO for them. Just two days back, one of my friend who is in her high school asked me to edit her pics. I said her to send here pic as an attachment in an email. Her reply was amusing. She was saying that she has to do extra work. I just didn't know how it is an extra work to send the same stuff over email rather than on whatsapp.
To your first point, social networks are what you make of them. Don't judge. :) It's also still a fact that, especially in India (when trying to get hired by a western tech company), being able to effectively communicate using western idiom and being up to date on trends, etc, is almost as valuable as your technical chops. I can train you to program. I can't train you to work well with others.