10 ms·

Tenth Grade Tech Trends

294 points by j2labs 14y ago

ruswick 14y ago
Interesting commentary. However, a sample size on one doesn't yield a substantive-enough dataset to draw conclusions. As a high schooler, I can tell you that service use varies wildly based on location and demographic. Moreover, Josh's sister didn't really differentiate between her preferences and the preferences of her cohort in general. She may have very idiosyncratic social media use-cases. I know the way in which I use social media is very different from the way in which some of my friends use it, which in turn differs from the way many others use it. People are different, and they use services differently. I would take any assertion of how people use social media with a big grain of salt.
- j2labs 14y ago
  Josh doesn't imply otherwise. He is explicit that this post represents reflections on a conversation he had with his sister; it is indeed anecdotal.
  - hosh 14y ago
    The value of the article is not in its statistical likelihood, but rather, in recognizing how his assumptions blinded him. And actually listening to people.
    - ruswick 14y ago
      How is he to know if he was "blind?" The fact that one girl exhibited preferences counter to his assumptions does not mean that those assumption are incorrect.
      - j2labs 14y ago
        Because he expresses uncertainty in more than one of his take-aways. He uses stronger language when he has more confidence in the idea. "This may have..." or "I believe" or "this seems" all suggest he isn't stating fact and is instead thinking out loud about the possible implications of his experience. In other words: it's obvious the author knows he is reflecting on anecdotes.
      - hosh 14y ago
        "The fact that one girl exhibited preferences counter to his assumptions does not mean that those assumption are incorrect." <-- is exactly how you do not do customer development. You have stopped listening to the user.
        tedunangst 14y ago
        Assuming the first user you talk to is representative of all users is exactly how you do not do customer development.
        hosh 14y ago
        You're focusing on having things being driven by data. That is commendable. However, that only tells you a part of the story. There's a big blind spot of people who depend on analyzing things like this. And that is, they stop listening to other people. It is usually because such people are consumed with being right, or even trying to prove themselves right. The skeptical stance gets distorted into requiring other people to challenge your assumptions. Sometimes, it is a covert (as in Jungian shadow covert) way of feeling good about being contemptuous of other people. To really listen to other people, you give up the notion that it is all about you. In other words, it's better to assume that you don't know what you are are talking about. You don't have any preconceived notions blocking you from hearing someone out. You are not "listening" in the sense that you are waiting to for the other person to stop talking so you can tell them how they are wrong. You might even learn something. This is exactly what customer development is about: listening to other people. In any case, I doubt this will persuade you. That's the cool thing about this. Some people don't want to consider this, so it becomes an unfair advantage for the folks who do :-)
- corporalagumbo 14y ago
  Just like I get an intuitive sense that this article is on-the-money, I get an intuitive sense that your comment is wrong. Intelligent, investigatory conversations with individual subjects can be extremely insightful, and speak to much larger trends. Plus, I think you're discounting the power and spread of trends in youth culture. School is the pre-eminent breeding ground for fads.
  - ruswick 14y ago
    I can assure you, these trends are not reflected at my school. Why is her assertion of trends more valuable than mine or anyone else's? Why does her school better exemplify our cohort than mine or anyone else's? One conversation does not constitute a definitive explanation for the social media use of a generation. Use changes based on location, income, race and gender balance, ect. in schools. This is a complex topic. One anecdote can't offer any real insight.
    - corporalagumbo 14y ago
      I'm sorry, I didn't notice the part of your comment where you mentioned being a high schooler too - didn't mean to deny your contrasting experience. As the other commenter suggested, why don't you share your own take?
    - dpe82 14y ago
      > One anecdote can't offer any real insight. First of all, it can if it leads you to further investigation. Second, perhaps instead of only offering unhelpful criticism why don't you share what you see so we may all gain from a larger sample size?
JacksonGariety 14y ago
Being an 11th grader I can honestly say this is bizarre since I associate so well with both Josh and his sister at the same time. Kids use social media differently than the middle-aged.
- GuiA 14y ago
  Josh being in his 20s, it's funny to see that high schoolers already consider us "middle aged" :)
  - unimpressive 14y ago
    I don't think that's a majority opinion. And if it is then it's certainly not a new trend. I don't plan on dying at 40 anyway.
kunle 14y ago
Curious - all of our parents' preferred methods of communication cost money...letters, long distance phone calls, mobile phone calls. All of Josh's sister's (and her peer sets) methods of communication cost nothing (Instagram, Facebook, Kik, Twitter, Tumblr). Just an observation. Implications of this? Will companies one day pay us to talk to each other?! Separately - isn't Skype basically Facetime over 3G/4G (and not just wi-fi)? What is Skype lacking here?
- justhw 14y ago
  Josh's sister's (and her peer sets) methods of communication cost nothing You gotta have a data plan to access these from anywhere. Most schools don't have wifi. So, the actually can cost more than phone calls, letter etc...
  - kunle 14y ago
    Fair point actually - didn't consider that the cost is embedded. That said, How often are those the data hogs? (Anecdotally from myself, I rarely come near the data caps). My assumption is that even today, video apps are the most data intensive - outside of those, are folks hitting their data caps on a regular basis?
- schoash 14y ago
  In my point of view, skype is way too slow on ios. It takes ages to load and lags somehow.
  - kunle 14y ago
    I experience this also. In addition, the UI is kludged into iOS - they just did their best to port the desktop UI. It works, as apps go, but obviously wasn't built from the ground up for mobile.
dhughes 14y ago
My take on social Internet trends and technology seems to be everything is rushing towards mobility and has been since about 2004. When I first got on the Internet in the early 90s you sat at a desk with a CRT monitor and used a dial-up 14.4Kbps modem when the phone wasn't being used by your mom or sister. I didn't even have a cellphone yet. Then into the PDA phase, wifi came along, cable Internet, then better phones, more people on the web, commerce really picked up and then blogs etc. Each generation is exposed to mobile technology that's more powerful and the Internet it seems to young people isn't seen as a thing that is on monitor but a poor version of it is now on my phone, it's a tool to be used. Even tablets I can't see being popular like phones since they're too big, now if you had a folding tablet like Microsoft's killed-off Courier I could see that being popular. I can see mobility being the only way the Internet will be used by young people teens to 20s. The desktop computer will be too formal and seen as too stuffy and slow, chained to a desk at home.
- GuiA 14y ago
  >I can see mobility being the only way the Internet will be used by young people teens to 20s. The desktop computer will be too formal and seen as too stuffy and slow, chained to a desk at home. This is already the case. I have 2 teenage brothers; one (somewhat tech savvy) uses almost exclusively his tablet + mobile phone (he only uses his laptop to run a webradio); the other one (not tech savvy at all) only uses his cellphone.
martythemaniak 14y ago
"she swore all of her friends would use if one of my “entrepreneur friends” built it: a FaceTime-esque app that’s free." I don't get it - aren't there a ton of video chat apps? Not only the big ones (google, skype), but lots of startups as well - oovoo, etc?
- prostoalex 14y ago
  Must be the data consumption part. AT&T starter package is 300 MB a month.
  - kunle 14y ago
    Yep. The answer might be in someone who figures out how to optimize video chat for efficiency.
    - j2labs 14y ago
      Snapchat? Edit: I mean to suggest that photos might be the optimization.
      - kunle 14y ago
        Potentially, but I think the gap facetime/skype fills is real time, whereas snapchat is async no matter how you slice it. It's explicitly a call+response method of communication that the receiver can engage right away, or view tomorrow, and respond tomorrow. While sending a recorded video or highly compressed pic will benefit from more efficient data transfer, its still not quite the same as a live open video chat.
    - Evbn 14y ago
      Google+ hangouts are bandwidth optimized.
    - rory096 14y ago
      If the quality is too low, though, the benefits to communication from seeing your partner's facial features synchronized with their voice disappear, and people won't bother using it. If software identified the user's face in live video and transmitted just that at high resolution, discarding or compressing the rest, how much efficiency could be gained?
jgannonjr 14y ago
I'm not sure this has as much to do with her age as her gender (although I'm sure the former does play some kind of a role). My sister uses snapchat, instagram, and facetime all the time in the same ways as you described your sister does, and she's graduated from college. She uses it predominantly to communicate with her other female friends. I also know several girls my age (25/26) who use these services in the same way. It tends to be mostly the "social butterfly" type of girls. It's funny because these are the same girls who would flood their facebook walls with pictures throughout the day, and now they rarely if ever make a post. I could be wrong, but I don't see any guys using the services in the same way.
- deleted 14y ago
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Ogre 14y ago
I don't understand the FaceTime is too expensive comment. Before iOS 6 it was completely free, and now it's only not free in terms of celluar data usage when not on WiFi. When you switch a phone call over to FaceTime, it stops taking minutes away. The real drawback to FaceTime is that it's iOS/MacOS only.
justhw 14y ago
Tenth graders are customers without credit cards. How are snapchat and all the free apps generating revenue? ads?
- chris24 14y ago
  When I was in tenth grade I'd just use my dad's credit card.
- Evbn 14y ago
  They have credit /debit cards linked to parent accounts.
  - timthorn 14y ago
    Don't they have debit cards in their own name?
    - ams6110 14y ago
      Pretty hard to do if you're under 18, banks want a legally responsible person to own the account.
      - DanBC 14y ago
        Debit cards in theory do not allow any debt, thus there's not so much of a problem allowing under 18s to have them. See this UK account for 11 to 18 year olds which allows a debit card. (http://www.rbs.co.uk/personal/current-accounts/g1/young/revolve.ashx http://www.rbs.co.uk/personal/current-accounts/g1/young/revo...) HSBC give you a savings account when you're seven, and add a current account when you're 11, with a VISA debit card. (https://www.hsbc.co.uk/1/2/current-accounts/under-18-bank-account?HBEU_dyn_lnk=CurrentAccount_FilterTool_MyMoney_FindOutMore_ProductNameLinkButton https://www.hsbc.co.uk/1/2/current-accounts/under-18-bank-ac...)
        theatrus2 14y ago
        A lot of US banks still want 18-year olds or a parental guarantee. US banks love overage fees (making credit card interest rates an amazing bargain). Plus there is the liability of checks/ACH which can cause overdrafts.
jtchang 14y ago
Sure there are a lot of FaceTime like apps. But the problem is none of them have done a phenomenal job marketing to their demographic to really take market share. There are also a great deal of drawbacks to FaceTime which make it expensive. It costs cell data? That's expensive! It takes a lot of bandwidth? Also expensive. The point is that there are so many rough edges around the product that it makes it a pain in the ass to use. Slow choppy video is also a problem.
- ilaksh 14y ago
  Choppy video and cell data aren't rough edges on FaceTime. It just takes a lot of bandwidth to transmit and receive video.
k-mcgrady 14y ago
I don't think the Facebook issue has anything to do with their brand. I think the attitude that Facebook is addicting actually has more to do with people becoming bored with the service and noticing how much time they actually spend on it. Edit: >> "... my friends and I used Myspace in middle school, and we too abandoned it (for Facebook) once we reached high school" The conclusion drawn here might be incorrect. I'm not sure of the age of the author but could it be that he reached high school at the time when Myspace had fallen out of favour with most people and everyone was beginning to transition to Facebook? It's an interesting post, particularly the part about Snapchat. His sister's use of it seems to fit with the way Facebook was advertising Poke (I thought they just had to find another angle besides sexting but it sounds like there are other uses for it). After hearing this description it sounds like something I might use. A lot of the photos I share on Twitter/Instagram and things I find interesting or funny but I never need to see again. I usually have to then go and delete them from my camera roll and occasionally I go back through my Instagram feed and delete them. The idea of Snapchat (expiring images) seems to be what I need.
- deleted 14y ago
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- veridies 14y ago
  > I think the attitude that Facebook is addicting actually has more to do with people becoming bored with the service and noticing how much time they actually spend on it. This is still something Facebook should solve. Facebook, despite its public groups and pages, still fosters incredibly insular communities, and those can get tedious very quickly. The reason Tumblr and Twitter have any popularity is that they encourage finding and following new, interesting people. They have a lot more novel content and it's easy to explore and find more of it. If Facebook gets seen as the boring, traditional social network (which to some degree it has), then that seriously damages its credibility.
  - k-mcgrady 14y ago
    It's a hard problem to solve especially when the draw of Facebook is that you have a smaller network of people you actually know. You're right the definitely need to do something. I think they are trying to by creating a separate pages feed for example but even that isn't good enough yet.
andybak 14y ago
I was baffled by the "Facetime is expensive" comment. I'm in the UK. Are data plans that limited and WiFi that uncommon? How much data does Facetime use? The Facetime/iMessage slant is interesting. Do any of her peers have Android phones? Do platform choices follow class/ethnicity/age/region patterns to the extent where it's not even on her radar?
- hosh 14y ago
  You are right to be baffled. We in the US are also baffled. The US has a horrible wireless data market. It's not like the UK or Europe in general. The companies here have a strong enough legal lobbies to keep their monopolistic control over data. We're behind in terms of the amount of bandwidth we can access and how much it costs. These companies typically make over 50% margin on profits while at the same time complain that they do not have the resources to expand bandwidth, or that the US is too geographically spread out. Almost all the "unlimited" plans in the US actually has a limit. Typically, after a certain amount of usage, the bitrate gets capped. There are a good bit of wifi, but I suppose that then depends on if you want to find a coffee shop just to chat on FaceTime. I'm assuming the article was written by an author living in the US.
toobulkeh 14y ago
This diverse view is very good. It's always promising to pay attention outside of your generation and use-case. Family and friends are a great starter, but try different neighborhoods , cities, or even countries - there are a LOT more opportunities out there. Sadly, one thing I've found with people's suggestions (and I've heard a lot of "next hot app" suggestions as I'm sure you have as well) already exist. They just don't know that they do. Maybe there's a job for bringing those apps to those people? How meta.
r0s 14y ago
Interesting to me are the generational service abandonment patterns. The author mentions abandoning MySpace moving into highschool like the subject graduates past Tumblr. It's symbolic of the maturing nature of the individual. In the future perhaps social networks will find a way to iterate their brand with each generation to prevent losing users to another new service.
- RyanZAG 14y ago
  Is it so much the individual maturing, and not just the platform itself losing relevance? The whole nature of these social platforms seems to be entirely ephemeral - they spread by word of mouth because others are using it. The problem comes in when you consider that a person isn't going to use more than 2 or 3 of these platforms. So as soon as a new platform is released, older platforms are guaranteed to lose users even if the new platform is worse, as it will take a number of weeks or months for a typical user to understand and then reject the new platform. During that time, the older platform isn't being used. This exact issue seems to apply to online gaming as well, so this isn't some new discovery of human behavior. There are some 'big' games (warcraft, cod) that retain their users even after a decade - but they do this by reinventing themselves and recreating their products constantly. I think social media and gaming are similar enough for a lot of these behavior traits to apply to social media also - which means the correct approach is to redesign/improve core parts of your social platform at least once a year to keep it relevant.
- Detrus 14y ago
  And if these patterns hold how can any social media service be the next big anything? People just want a consistent interface to communicate. There's no UX reason to separate email, facebook, instachat twumblr or whatever from each other. Yes there are different reasons for communicating but they can all function under one roof. The next big trend of sending pokes with 12 second color corrected videos that get deleted after watching can live inside Facebook, G+, or TwEmail 3.0
- corporalagumbo 14y ago
  My gut reaction is "not going to happen." Because I think people are drawn to companies with honest, relaxed attitudes - not companies carefully calculating their identity to win a new market share and desperately attempting to avoid obsolescence. And I think this consumer preference is becoming even more influential as the main arena of corporate competition becomes increasingly digital and social. Look at how successful Microsoft has been so far at proving that it's still cool. But then, maybe you're right - maybe we should look forward to some incredibly sophisticated, calculating companies in the future.
dysoco 14y ago
I'm also a 15 years old teenager living in Argentina, but here things are somewhat different. First, no one has a "real" smartphone, most are cheap Nokia phones with some applications for Facebook: People who have money usually buy BlackBerries, I have a Samsung Galaxy Ace (Being an Android fan) that I bought in Spain: but truth is smartphones are really expensive. Facebook... everything is about Facebook here: Teenagers don't use any other IM service besides Facebook Messenger, they even use it in their phones. I find it extremely painful to communicate because I need to keep a Facebook window tab opened if I want to chat with someone (Well, I use Pidgin now). I don't even go into Facebook, the Facebook feed looks like browsing /r/funny New in Reddit, people don't post original content: Just memes copied from the internet and cristian stuff. People tend to have a lot of friends in Facebook: I think I don't have more than 50 friends: Those who I really would like to talk with me and have access to my pictures. What people really use here is ask.fm , I'm not sure if people in other countries use it: but the basic idea is that you create an account and people (Logged, or as Anonymous) post you questions and you answer: Then it gets posted in your Facebook. I don't understand why would anyone want to use that service: The questions are dumb and nosense. Other questions are personal, and some people still answer that. Nowadays most of my Facebook feed is 75% ask.fm links, it's really annoying. Other services? Some people use Twitter, but not really; mostly teenagers following One Direction and Justin Bieber. Blogging? Nah, no one reads blogs: they don't like reading anything larger than a couple lines of text (I think this: http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1945/07/as-we-may-think/303881/ http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1945/07/as-we-ma... can be relevant). Youtube... they like dumb vlogs and some people like gameplays, I find this kind of videos very annoying and dumb. Oh, not even mention Mail: most of people can't remember their passwords, for me, Mail is vital. Tumblr? No one knows what that is. Ah, no one uses Instagram either, and I'm glad... So resuming: Teenagers only use the internet for Facebook, and, sometimes, reading the Wikipedia (When they have to do something for school) and that's really bad: They have a wonderful tool that they don't want to use, although the language (Most of teenagers don't have a good level of English, or at least they refuse to read English) can be an impediment. For me the internet is amazing: you can learn whatever you want, for free, thanks to tools like Khan Academy, Coursera and Udacity: But people refuse to, and the language is not the only issue. I think we should focus our knowledge into motivating the Teenagers to get interested into this, instead of developing more applications like Poke or a Facetime killer.
n1c 14y ago
> “entrepreneur friends” Instead of /nerds/ or some such is quite a nice touch.
biturd 14y ago
I think he missed the point about FaceTime. Not /that/ many 10th graders have iPhones. 110.00 a month is too much, so the push the limits of their iPods. We don't need a new app so kids can do video chat, there's Skype and others for that. They like the ease if use. The problem is to tack in another data plan restriction removal to open FaceTime with AT&T and possibly others is the barrier. I have a 4gs and can't use FaceTime over the cellular network without paying AT&T more money or losing my unlimited plan. So I don't use it. All this comes down to the same conclusion the author had. There's a huge market in the term category. They have deep pockets by proxy of their patents. But parents won't drop that much more for FaceTime. Want to tap that market AT&T, Verizon, etc? Allows FaceTime on your network. And Apple, open iMessage and FaceTime so that it can be coded on Sndroid and everything else. Apple gets brand recognition ala "FireWire" and we get a service we want that there no reason to pay more for. 29.00 a month for unlimited texts. Insane. 90% of my friends have iPhones. But messages from my bank, pharmacy,etc go through a non iMessage service. Apple needs to open up the protocol and allow an API gateway so regular SMS messages can get through. Then we can all dump the unlimited text plans or the 30 cents ala carte text plans.
- greenyoda 14y ago
  "Apple needs to open up the protocol and allow an API gateway so regular SMS messages can get through." Apple creating an API wouldn't accomplish much, since Apple still wouldn't have access to the SMS message streams. The mobile carriers would have to route SMS traffic to Apple's gateway, and they're not likely to agree to that, since SMS is a huge cash cow for them. One possibility would be to cut SMS out entirely, by convincing the senders of these messages (banks, etc.) to connect directly to Apple's API instead of sending SMS. But the problem is that Apple's service is proprietary, and all the people on Android phones will be on competing services with different APIs. So banks would have to figure out how to talk to all these different APIs. This isn't a compelling issue for banks to be spending their efforts on, since any customer who wants to receive their banking alerts without using SMS already can: these alerts are also available via e-mail, which is an open, universal and standardized protocol. An alternate approach would be for Apple to create an e-mail to iMessage gateway that would give each user a dedicated e-mail address that would forward to their iMessage stream (similar to the many e-mail to SMS gateways that currently exist). Users could then subscribe that e-mail address to their banking alerts. Another advantage of avoiding SMS entirely is that it's an unreliable protocol, in which 1-5% of messages are lost[1]. So if your alert is actually important, you may not want to entrust it to SMS in the first place. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SMS#Unreliability https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SMS#Unreliability
hosh 14y ago
Not really tech trends, but rather, product trends. Still interesting. I think the biggest takeaway is: just because your parents are clueless about the generation gap doesn't mean that you are not either. Don't bring in your assumptions. (And following that: tech is now iterating fast enough that a "generation gap" can now be seen among siblings, not just parent-children).
j2labs 14y ago
Keek might make a reasonable example of something do ewhere between facetime and instagram. It's a lot like instagram, but the medium is <36s long videos. Just bringing it up as food for thought. No real point here.
Shank 14y ago
I'm in 11th and I read Hacker News on a daily basis, so I'm a bit outside the general population when it comes to issues like this. With that said, her thoughts on Facebook are echoed by everyone who I've talked to. Many are sick of it, and fewer each day check it regularly. If I need to contact someone, even someone with Facebook on their smartphone, it takes hours to get a reply. If I use SMS I'm acknowledged near instantly.
- corporalagumbo 14y ago
  I feel like Facebook has become the boring Uncle of our digital lives. Nobody really likes it, except for those blissfully ignorant people who haven't realised how dumb they look posting all the time, but we can't get rid of it. I agree that texting is usually faster than Facebook messaging (though because I use WP7 the line is pretty well blurred between the two for me) but you tend to be Facebook friends with more people than you have phone numbers for and/or text regularly. Maybe this is a little different for you because you are still in school, but as a young adult Facebook is the quick, reliable place where everyone I know is stored. I read a description of the computer desktop as the place which you can always find on your computer, and so the place where unconfident computer users end up storing all of their files. I think Facebook is the equivalent of the desktop for social contacts on the web. Which I think will give it a lot of resilience to unpopularity, so even if no one loves it, it'll probably stick around.
  - Shank 14y ago
    I use Facebook as the "universal directory" if I don't have contact details for someone, which is the infuriating part. If I need to contact someone I don't have a phone number or some IM contact for, I go to Facebook and look there. A great analogy would be phone books. I've not found a person who actually likes getting or using them, but they were the best place to find someone's phone number if all you had was a name and a bit of an address.
- jzone3 14y ago
  I'm in 10th grade, and I have noticed that my friends and I (well especially me) rarely use SMS. 99% of the time we use Facebook messages to communicate.
unimpressive 14y ago
I'm going to break the "Don't mention my age." rule to write this post. Only because here it's relevant. What you use and how you use it has a lot of factors besides age. It has to do with your friends, their friends, where you live, what school you go to or what job you have, etc etc. I'd like to share an anecdote about umwelt. A few days ago, I walked into a coffee shop. I sat in that coffee shop for two hours.[0] When I first walked in my jaw hit the floor as I scanned the room. Everyone had tablets, young, old, there was no common pattern. There was one person I could see reading a physical book, and two graphic designers in the back with Macbooks. My first thought was "Either I'm living in a bubble, or coffee shops are a bubble.". I figured that if this is what it looks like in suburbia, then it must be even crazier elsewhere. That's when it hit me. If silicon valley developers do their work in coffee shops, and all they ever see there is mobile devices, then they'll naturally develop for mobile devices. But then mobile is new, hot, and growing all the time. IIRC mobile sales have already outdone consumer desktop and laptop sales. Are developers choosing mobile because it's new and big, or because they see it in coffee shops all the time? Probably both. They're not exactly mutually exclusive. Just like how you have to ask if consumers are switching to tablets because laptops are too bulky, or because they're more usable, or because that's where the focus of every up and coming developer is right now? Probably a combination of all three and more. All of that might have seemed pretty obvious to you. Well it wasn't to me, heres why: 1. In my circle of friends, everyone still uses desktops or laptops. Having only a laptop seems to be a result of financial concerns, not a lack of demand for a desktop. 2. At my school a handful of people have tablets. Me being one of them. A group of kids asked me what kind of cellphone it was when I first used it in class. 3. Among my friends Facebook seems to be the dominant communication medium, alongside telephone services. I only use the latter. 4. My school has uncommon demographics, The vast vast majority could be described as one or more of the following: Nerd, Hipster, Extreme anime and manga fan, Gamer. So I guess I myself sort of live in a bubble. I don't even own a cellphone. I live on the west coast of the US. Not exactly a remote location. [0]: This was the first time I've ever actually sat down in a coffee shop.
- phillmv 14y ago
  Things change a lot once you begin to have disposable income. Almost everyone my age has a smartphone.
exodust 14y ago
15 year olds definitely want to have "compatibility with different systems" including the source of their pay packets, allowance, and access to resources - ie old people and their old email. But it turns out email, even if used infrequently, is still important. It's easy to have multiple accounts sit there indefinitely. Not controlled by one fatcat pulling privacy strings and strategizing your online activity. Meanwhile another million blue 'f' logos are printed, each destined for a shopfront window, cash register, door. Beckoning the registration and sign up and sign over of your stuff. In return, FB tells a few advertisers about you and your stuff. And FB also reserves the right to build the mechanics of your social communications, private and public, the particulars of which will be in accordance with Facebook's sole decision and strategy in an advertiser-hungry world... And other things without notice and so on.
- zdrtx 14y ago
  To be clear, Facebook doesn't tell any advertisers any information about any users. Advertisers tell Facebook what kinds of people they want to see their advertisement, and Facebook shows the advertisement to those kinds of people.
  - karambahh 14y ago
    Supposedly :-) I am always amazed at how poorly personalized facebook are for me or my friends. Basically it's always made of 60% "meeting someone from the area" aka some shaddy semi-porn website. I am really curious of the efficient of advertisement on FB. I know some large brand (GM I think?) pulled off FB because they did not see any ROI. I wonder if it holds true worldwide and for smaller brands...
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drwl 14y ago
> real time social web all the major buzz words in one phrase!
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Uhhrrr 14y ago
I think it makes total sense that no one she knows reads blogs. Most kids don't read the paper, or read books for fun. This is not so much devolution of reading habits as democratization of computer usage.
- corporalagumbo 14y ago
  Yeah. Computing has trickled down from the intellectual elite to the masses. I suspect more curious, analytical and information-seeking attitudes will trickle down in time too.
- wildgift 14y ago
  This is true, but there are also kids her age who do read the paper, and it's actually a prime age for pleasure reading. His sister probably isn't going to take up reading or writing for reasons other than necessity. SaMo is not a crappy community - it's a wealthy one really - and very well educated, so if she's not interested now, she probably won't be in the future.
SeoxyS 14y ago
That last point about FaceTime sounds like an opportunity for Sean Parker's Airtime.
philwelch 14y ago
FTA: For me, Twitter is predominantly a link discovery service — admittedly, that is a simplified view, but it’s helpful for these purposes — so I followed-up on her Twitter comments by asking where she discovers links. “What do you mean?” She couldn’t even understand what I was asking. I rephrased the question: “What links do you read? What sites do they come from? What blogs?” "I don’t read links. I don’t read blogs. I don’t know. You mean like funny videos on Facebook? Sometimes people post funny links there. But I’m not really interested in anything yet, like you are." Television was a major blow to reading for decades up until the internet, but now even the internet is starting to destroy literacy. It's very unsettling.
- corporalagumbo 14y ago
  My impression is the exact opposite: I see people reading and debating more than ever thanks to the internet. I think thanks to the internet we are in a golden era of literacy, but we just don't notice it because we're too busy complaining with other highly-literate people on highly debate-focussed websites such at this one about the more obvious non-literary manifestations of popular culture.
  - philwelch 14y ago
    One need only look as far as Reddit to see that HN is highly unusual in this respect.
    - corporalagumbo 14y ago
      People were plenty stupid before the Internet. It was just hidden before, now it's all out in the open. Let's just see what happens next - remember, we're only about three to four years into a fully online society :)
      - philwelch 14y ago
        Stupid is one thing. Disinterested in reading is my primary concern.
rdl 14y ago
I don't understand why FaceTime is viewed as expensive. Isn't it free? I guess you pay for data, but 95% of the time I'm on wifi (home, office), and I'd assume schools, wherever kids spend time (coffee shops?), etc. have wifi too.
- plorkyeran 14y ago
  High schools generally don't have much in the way of WiFi coverage.
jff 14y ago
I wouldn't be too much bothered by what tenth grade kids like, because they don't have any damn money.
- corporalagumbo 14y ago
  Wow. You must be lost - Hackernews is, as far as I am aware, a site for intelligent, open-minded people who recognise that valuable information may be found in many inconspicuous, non-intuitive locations. People intelligent enough to realise that kids are historically early-adopters and re-shapers of technology, pioneering uses and social integrations which, while dismissed as trivial by ignorant, hidebound adults, often end up exploding into mainstream popularity and defining the future of technology.
  - jff 14y ago
    The article describes how these kids are all using free services, and that they won't use the ones that costs money. So I'd say that if you have any business model besides "Ads, ads, glorious ads on our user-generated content!", I think teenagers are probably going to pass by your service, however good it may be.
    - corporalagumbo 14y ago
      That sounds like a very narrow-minded interpretation to me.
    - dpe82 14y ago
      > Ads, ads, glorious ads Is there something wrong with that? Total US advertising expenditures for 2011 were $144 billion[0]. UGC is of course quite difficult to monetize, but it's not impossible. [0] http://kantarmediana.com/intelligence/press/us-advertising-expenditures-increased-08-percent-2011 http://kantarmediana.com/intelligence/press/us-advertising-e...
- potatolicious 14y ago
  If kids really don't have any spending power, we wouldn't have Fruit Loops, Spongebob Squarepants, Barbie, Disney movies, or Harry Potter. Children drive an enormous amount of consumer spending. Their usage patterns matter. If anything, extracting money from an adult may be easier indirectly by their children than directly.
jhkdesign 14y ago
A few observations: 1. Facebook is trying to stay relevant by copying promising social network features (e.g. Whatsapp, Snapchat, Foursquare, ...) 2. Although Facebook is trying hard, it's having a tough time competing with the new social network because of preconceived notion of what Facebook is. (Facebook is news feed of personal social graph, not ephemeral real-time chat like Snapchat.) More on this: http://www.futureofsocialnetwork.com/2012/12/social-network-as-context.html http://www.futureofsocialnetwork.com/2012/12/social-network-... 3. Although Facebook is having hard time competing with new, it has the big enough network to be the social platform. People still have account because of network-effect.
floatingice 14y ago
This is one if the most interesting articles I've read on HN in a looonnng time. More tech companies should be thinking about this.
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frasierman 14y ago
http://willsmidlein.com/blog/tech-trends/ http://willsmidlein.com/blog/tech-trends/
wildgift 14y ago
Look, some people get into Princeton, and some don't. LOl. People are different, and in my experience, some brainy people like twitter and other link finding services, to find things to READ. We watch instructional videos or download all the awesome lectures that universities have posted. We use facebook, but end up posting links to news stories and even longer things like wikipedia articles and actual papers and prose. We like Reddit and even stackexchange. We love wikipedia. We're a minority. Way more people like to take photos of each other and send them to each other. They like to share photos of the cat, babies, etc. They share inspirational poetry. Even more people just want videophone of some kind, or something like twitter, but sans too much linking. More photos. t.co for everything. I know someone who got internet mainly for consuming porn and maybe some video games. He's an adult, has a college degree, and works with people who wish kids would read more, or be more interested in school, or basically be more like the brainy kids. He didn't go to college because he loved knowledge. He went to get a middle class job, and because his parents went to college. Personally, I was the first to go to college in my family, and went to a good one. I'm a big nerd. My brother and I taught ourselves to program computers. (He's smarter than me, too.) I liked to read. I still mostly read online. I've put up a few left-wing websites, have an almost obligatory anger toward the boss (comes from growing up working class), and still buy books. I just accept that people are different. Some people are into reading, and others aren't. Some people like to think about things, and others are more about looking at people. Some people go with the flow, and others don't.
- ubercore 14y ago
  I'm not quite sure what statement you're making here? Where does Princeton, or education at all, have to do with what 15 year olds use for technology?

294 points by j2labs 14y ago

Interesting commentary. However, a sample size on one doesn't yield a substantive-enough dataset to draw conclusions. As a high schooler, I can tell you that service use varies wildly based on location and demographic. Moreover, Josh's sister didn't really differentiate between her preferences and the preferences of her cohort in general. She may have very idiosyncratic social media use-cases. I know the way in which I use social media is very different from the way in which some of my friends use it, which in turn differs from the way many others use it. People are different, and they use services differently. I would take any assertion of how people use social media with a big grain of salt.

j2labs 14y ago
Josh doesn't imply otherwise. He is explicit that this post represents reflections on a conversation he had with his sister; it is indeed anecdotal.
- hosh 14y ago
  The value of the article is not in its statistical likelihood, but rather, in recognizing how his assumptions blinded him. And actually listening to people.
  - ruswick 14y ago
    How is he to know if he was "blind?" The fact that one girl exhibited preferences counter to his assumptions does not mean that those assumption are incorrect.
    - j2labs 14y ago
      Because he expresses uncertainty in more than one of his take-aways. He uses stronger language when he has more confidence in the idea. "This may have..." or "I believe" or "this seems" all suggest he isn't stating fact and is instead thinking out loud about the possible implications of his experience. In other words: it's obvious the author knows he is reflecting on anecdotes.
    - hosh 14y ago
      "The fact that one girl exhibited preferences counter to his assumptions does not mean that those assumption are incorrect." <-- is exactly how you do not do customer development. You have stopped listening to the user.
      - tedunangst 14y ago
        Assuming the first user you talk to is representative of all users is exactly how you do not do customer development.
        hosh 14y ago
        You're focusing on having things being driven by data. That is commendable. However, that only tells you a part of the story. There's a big blind spot of people who depend on analyzing things like this. And that is, they stop listening to other people. It is usually because such people are consumed with being right, or even trying to prove themselves right. The skeptical stance gets distorted into requiring other people to challenge your assumptions. Sometimes, it is a covert (as in Jungian shadow covert) way of feeling good about being contemptuous of other people. To really listen to other people, you give up the notion that it is all about you. In other words, it's better to assume that you don't know what you are are talking about. You don't have any preconceived notions blocking you from hearing someone out. You are not "listening" in the sense that you are waiting to for the other person to stop talking so you can tell them how they are wrong. You might even learn something. This is exactly what customer development is about: listening to other people. In any case, I doubt this will persuade you. That's the cool thing about this. Some people don't want to consider this, so it becomes an unfair advantage for the folks who do :-)
corporalagumbo 14y ago
Just like I get an intuitive sense that this article is on-the-money, I get an intuitive sense that your comment is wrong. Intelligent, investigatory conversations with individual subjects can be extremely insightful, and speak to much larger trends. Plus, I think you're discounting the power and spread of trends in youth culture. School is the pre-eminent breeding ground for fads.
- ruswick 14y ago
  I can assure you, these trends are not reflected at my school. Why is her assertion of trends more valuable than mine or anyone else's? Why does her school better exemplify our cohort than mine or anyone else's? One conversation does not constitute a definitive explanation for the social media use of a generation. Use changes based on location, income, race and gender balance, ect. in schools. This is a complex topic. One anecdote can't offer any real insight.
  - corporalagumbo 14y ago
    I'm sorry, I didn't notice the part of your comment where you mentioned being a high schooler too - didn't mean to deny your contrasting experience. As the other commenter suggested, why don't you share your own take?
  - dpe82 14y ago
    > One anecdote can't offer any real insight. First of all, it can if it leads you to further investigation. Second, perhaps instead of only offering unhelpful criticism why don't you share what you see so we may all gain from a larger sample size?

JacksonGariety 14y ago

Being an 11th grader I can honestly say this is bizarre since I associate so well with both Josh and his sister at the same time. Kids use social media differently than the middle-aged.

GuiA 14y ago
Josh being in his 20s, it's funny to see that high schoolers already consider us "middle aged" :)
- unimpressive 14y ago
  I don't think that's a majority opinion. And if it is then it's certainly not a new trend. I don't plan on dying at 40 anyway.

kunle 14y ago

Curious - all of our parents' preferred methods of communication cost money...letters, long distance phone calls, mobile phone calls. All of Josh's sister's (and her peer sets) methods of communication cost nothing (Instagram, Facebook, Kik, Twitter, Tumblr). Just an observation. Implications of this? Will companies one day pay us to talk to each other?! Separately - isn't Skype basically Facetime over 3G/4G (and not just wi-fi)? What is Skype lacking here?

justhw 14y ago
Josh's sister's (and her peer sets) methods of communication cost nothing You gotta have a data plan to access these from anywhere. Most schools don't have wifi. So, the actually can cost more than phone calls, letter etc...
- kunle 14y ago
  Fair point actually - didn't consider that the cost is embedded. That said, How often are those the data hogs? (Anecdotally from myself, I rarely come near the data caps). My assumption is that even today, video apps are the most data intensive - outside of those, are folks hitting their data caps on a regular basis?
schoash 14y ago
In my point of view, skype is way too slow on ios. It takes ages to load and lags somehow.
- kunle 14y ago
  I experience this also. In addition, the UI is kludged into iOS - they just did their best to port the desktop UI. It works, as apps go, but obviously wasn't built from the ground up for mobile.

dhughes 14y ago

My take on social Internet trends and technology seems to be everything is rushing towards mobility and has been since about 2004. When I first got on the Internet in the early 90s you sat at a desk with a CRT monitor and used a dial-up 14.4Kbps modem when the phone wasn't being used by your mom or sister. I didn't even have a cellphone yet. Then into the PDA phase, wifi came along, cable Internet, then better phones, more people on the web, commerce really picked up and then blogs etc. Each generation is exposed to mobile technology that's more powerful and the Internet it seems to young people isn't seen as a thing that is on monitor but a poor version of it is now on my phone, it's a tool to be used. Even tablets I can't see being popular like phones since they're too big, now if you had a folding tablet like Microsoft's killed-off Courier I could see that being popular. I can see mobility being the only way the Internet will be used by young people teens to 20s. The desktop computer will be too formal and seen as too stuffy and slow, chained to a desk at home.

GuiA 14y ago
>I can see mobility being the only way the Internet will be used by young people teens to 20s. The desktop computer will be too formal and seen as too stuffy and slow, chained to a desk at home. This is already the case. I have 2 teenage brothers; one (somewhat tech savvy) uses almost exclusively his tablet + mobile phone (he only uses his laptop to run a webradio); the other one (not tech savvy at all) only uses his cellphone.

martythemaniak 14y ago

"she swore all of her friends would use if one of my “entrepreneur friends” built it: a FaceTime-esque app that’s free." I don't get it - aren't there a ton of video chat apps? Not only the big ones (google, skype), but lots of startups as well - oovoo, etc?

prostoalex 14y ago
Must be the data consumption part. AT&T starter package is 300 MB a month.
- kunle 14y ago
  Yep. The answer might be in someone who figures out how to optimize video chat for efficiency.
  - j2labs 14y ago
    Snapchat? Edit: I mean to suggest that photos might be the optimization.
    - kunle 14y ago
      Potentially, but I think the gap facetime/skype fills is real time, whereas snapchat is async no matter how you slice it. It's explicitly a call+response method of communication that the receiver can engage right away, or view tomorrow, and respond tomorrow. While sending a recorded video or highly compressed pic will benefit from more efficient data transfer, its still not quite the same as a live open video chat.
  - Evbn 14y ago
    Google+ hangouts are bandwidth optimized.
  - rory096 14y ago
    If the quality is too low, though, the benefits to communication from seeing your partner's facial features synchronized with their voice disappear, and people won't bother using it. If software identified the user's face in live video and transmitted just that at high resolution, discarding or compressing the rest, how much efficiency could be gained?

jgannonjr 14y ago

I'm not sure this has as much to do with her age as her gender (although I'm sure the former does play some kind of a role). My sister uses snapchat, instagram, and facetime all the time in the same ways as you described your sister does, and she's graduated from college. She uses it predominantly to communicate with her other female friends. I also know several girls my age (25/26) who use these services in the same way. It tends to be mostly the "social butterfly" type of girls. It's funny because these are the same girls who would flood their facebook walls with pictures throughout the day, and now they rarely if ever make a post. I could be wrong, but I don't see any guys using the services in the same way.

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Ogre 14y ago

I don't understand the FaceTime is too expensive comment. Before iOS 6 it was completely free, and now it's only not free in terms of celluar data usage when not on WiFi. When you switch a phone call over to FaceTime, it stops taking minutes away. The real drawback to FaceTime is that it's iOS/MacOS only.

justhw 14y ago

Tenth graders are customers without credit cards. How are snapchat and all the free apps generating revenue? ads?

chris24 14y ago
When I was in tenth grade I'd just use my dad's credit card.
Evbn 14y ago
They have credit /debit cards linked to parent accounts.
- timthorn 14y ago
  Don't they have debit cards in their own name?
  - ams6110 14y ago
    Pretty hard to do if you're under 18, banks want a legally responsible person to own the account.
    - DanBC 14y ago
      Debit cards in theory do not allow any debt, thus there's not so much of a problem allowing under 18s to have them. See this UK account for 11 to 18 year olds which allows a debit card. (http://www.rbs.co.uk/personal/current-accounts/g1/young/revolve.ashx http://www.rbs.co.uk/personal/current-accounts/g1/young/revo...) HSBC give you a savings account when you're seven, and add a current account when you're 11, with a VISA debit card. (https://www.hsbc.co.uk/1/2/current-accounts/under-18-bank-account?HBEU_dyn_lnk=CurrentAccount_FilterTool_MyMoney_FindOutMore_ProductNameLinkButton https://www.hsbc.co.uk/1/2/current-accounts/under-18-bank-ac...)
      - theatrus2 14y ago
        A lot of US banks still want 18-year olds or a parental guarantee. US banks love overage fees (making credit card interest rates an amazing bargain). Plus there is the liability of checks/ACH which can cause overdrafts.

jtchang 14y ago

Sure there are a lot of FaceTime like apps. But the problem is none of them have done a phenomenal job marketing to their demographic to really take market share. There are also a great deal of drawbacks to FaceTime which make it expensive. It costs cell data? That's expensive! It takes a lot of bandwidth? Also expensive. The point is that there are so many rough edges around the product that it makes it a pain in the ass to use. Slow choppy video is also a problem.

ilaksh 14y ago
Choppy video and cell data aren't rough edges on FaceTime. It just takes a lot of bandwidth to transmit and receive video.

k-mcgrady 14y ago

I don't think the Facebook issue has anything to do with their brand. I think the attitude that Facebook is addicting actually has more to do with people becoming bored with the service and noticing how much time they actually spend on it. Edit: >> "... my friends and I used Myspace in middle school, and we too abandoned it (for Facebook) once we reached high school" The conclusion drawn here might be incorrect. I'm not sure of the age of the author but could it be that he reached high school at the time when Myspace had fallen out of favour with most people and everyone was beginning to transition to Facebook? It's an interesting post, particularly the part about Snapchat. His sister's use of it seems to fit with the way Facebook was advertising Poke (I thought they just had to find another angle besides sexting but it sounds like there are other uses for it). After hearing this description it sounds like something I might use. A lot of the photos I share on Twitter/Instagram and things I find interesting or funny but I never need to see again. I usually have to then go and delete them from my camera roll and occasionally I go back through my Instagram feed and delete them. The idea of Snapchat (expiring images) seems to be what I need.

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veridies 14y ago
> I think the attitude that Facebook is addicting actually has more to do with people becoming bored with the service and noticing how much time they actually spend on it. This is still something Facebook should solve. Facebook, despite its public groups and pages, still fosters incredibly insular communities, and those can get tedious very quickly. The reason Tumblr and Twitter have any popularity is that they encourage finding and following new, interesting people. They have a lot more novel content and it's easy to explore and find more of it. If Facebook gets seen as the boring, traditional social network (which to some degree it has), then that seriously damages its credibility.
- k-mcgrady 14y ago
  It's a hard problem to solve especially when the draw of Facebook is that you have a smaller network of people you actually know. You're right the definitely need to do something. I think they are trying to by creating a separate pages feed for example but even that isn't good enough yet.

andybak 14y ago

I was baffled by the "Facetime is expensive" comment. I'm in the UK. Are data plans that limited and WiFi that uncommon? How much data does Facetime use? The Facetime/iMessage slant is interesting. Do any of her peers have Android phones? Do platform choices follow class/ethnicity/age/region patterns to the extent where it's not even on her radar?

hosh 14y ago
You are right to be baffled. We in the US are also baffled. The US has a horrible wireless data market. It's not like the UK or Europe in general. The companies here have a strong enough legal lobbies to keep their monopolistic control over data. We're behind in terms of the amount of bandwidth we can access and how much it costs. These companies typically make over 50% margin on profits while at the same time complain that they do not have the resources to expand bandwidth, or that the US is too geographically spread out. Almost all the "unlimited" plans in the US actually has a limit. Typically, after a certain amount of usage, the bitrate gets capped. There are a good bit of wifi, but I suppose that then depends on if you want to find a coffee shop just to chat on FaceTime. I'm assuming the article was written by an author living in the US.

toobulkeh 14y ago

This diverse view is very good. It's always promising to pay attention outside of your generation and use-case. Family and friends are a great starter, but try different neighborhoods , cities, or even countries - there are a LOT more opportunities out there. Sadly, one thing I've found with people's suggestions (and I've heard a lot of "next hot app" suggestions as I'm sure you have as well) already exist. They just don't know that they do. Maybe there's a job for bringing those apps to those people? How meta.

r0s 14y ago

Interesting to me are the generational service abandonment patterns. The author mentions abandoning MySpace moving into highschool like the subject graduates past Tumblr. It's symbolic of the maturing nature of the individual. In the future perhaps social networks will find a way to iterate their brand with each generation to prevent losing users to another new service.

RyanZAG 14y ago
Is it so much the individual maturing, and not just the platform itself losing relevance? The whole nature of these social platforms seems to be entirely ephemeral - they spread by word of mouth because others are using it. The problem comes in when you consider that a person isn't going to use more than 2 or 3 of these platforms. So as soon as a new platform is released, older platforms are guaranteed to lose users even if the new platform is worse, as it will take a number of weeks or months for a typical user to understand and then reject the new platform. During that time, the older platform isn't being used. This exact issue seems to apply to online gaming as well, so this isn't some new discovery of human behavior. There are some 'big' games (warcraft, cod) that retain their users even after a decade - but they do this by reinventing themselves and recreating their products constantly. I think social media and gaming are similar enough for a lot of these behavior traits to apply to social media also - which means the correct approach is to redesign/improve core parts of your social platform at least once a year to keep it relevant.
Detrus 14y ago
And if these patterns hold how can any social media service be the next big anything? People just want a consistent interface to communicate. There's no UX reason to separate email, facebook, instachat twumblr or whatever from each other. Yes there are different reasons for communicating but they can all function under one roof. The next big trend of sending pokes with 12 second color corrected videos that get deleted after watching can live inside Facebook, G+, or TwEmail 3.0
corporalagumbo 14y ago
My gut reaction is "not going to happen." Because I think people are drawn to companies with honest, relaxed attitudes - not companies carefully calculating their identity to win a new market share and desperately attempting to avoid obsolescence. And I think this consumer preference is becoming even more influential as the main arena of corporate competition becomes increasingly digital and social. Look at how successful Microsoft has been so far at proving that it's still cool. But then, maybe you're right - maybe we should look forward to some incredibly sophisticated, calculating companies in the future.

dysoco 14y ago

I'm also a 15 years old teenager living in Argentina, but here things are somewhat different. First, no one has a "real" smartphone, most are cheap Nokia phones with some applications for Facebook: People who have money usually buy BlackBerries, I have a Samsung Galaxy Ace (Being an Android fan) that I bought in Spain: but truth is smartphones are really expensive. Facebook... everything is about Facebook here: Teenagers don't use any other IM service besides Facebook Messenger, they even use it in their phones. I find it extremely painful to communicate because I need to keep a Facebook window tab opened if I want to chat with someone (Well, I use Pidgin now). I don't even go into Facebook, the Facebook feed looks like browsing /r/funny New in Reddit, people don't post original content: Just memes copied from the internet and cristian stuff. People tend to have a lot of friends in Facebook: I think I don't have more than 50 friends: Those who I really would like to talk with me and have access to my pictures. What people really use here is ask.fm , I'm not sure if people in other countries use it: but the basic idea is that you create an account and people (Logged, or as Anonymous) post you questions and you answer: Then it gets posted in your Facebook. I don't understand why would anyone want to use that service: The questions are dumb and nosense. Other questions are personal, and some people still answer that. Nowadays most of my Facebook feed is 75% ask.fm links, it's really annoying. Other services? Some people use Twitter, but not really; mostly teenagers following One Direction and Justin Bieber. Blogging? Nah, no one reads blogs: they don't like reading anything larger than a couple lines of text (I think this: http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1945/07/as-we-may-think/303881/ http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1945/07/as-we-ma... can be relevant). Youtube... they like dumb vlogs and some people like gameplays, I find this kind of videos very annoying and dumb. Oh, not even mention Mail: most of people can't remember their passwords, for me, Mail is vital. Tumblr? No one knows what that is. Ah, no one uses Instagram either, and I'm glad... So resuming: Teenagers only use the internet for Facebook, and, sometimes, reading the Wikipedia (When they have to do something for school) and that's really bad: They have a wonderful tool that they don't want to use, although the language (Most of teenagers don't have a good level of English, or at least they refuse to read English) can be an impediment. For me the internet is amazing: you can learn whatever you want, for free, thanks to tools like Khan Academy, Coursera and Udacity: But people refuse to, and the language is not the only issue. I think we should focus our knowledge into motivating the Teenagers to get interested into this, instead of developing more applications like Poke or a Facetime killer.

n1c 14y ago

> “entrepreneur friends” Instead of /nerds/ or some such is quite a nice touch.

biturd 14y ago

I think he missed the point about FaceTime. Not /that/ many 10th graders have iPhones. 110.00 a month is too much, so the push the limits of their iPods. We don't need a new app so kids can do video chat, there's Skype and others for that. They like the ease if use. The problem is to tack in another data plan restriction removal to open FaceTime with AT&T and possibly others is the barrier. I have a 4gs and can't use FaceTime over the cellular network without paying AT&T more money or losing my unlimited plan. So I don't use it. All this comes down to the same conclusion the author had. There's a huge market in the term category. They have deep pockets by proxy of their patents. But parents won't drop that much more for FaceTime. Want to tap that market AT&T, Verizon, etc? Allows FaceTime on your network. And Apple, open iMessage and FaceTime so that it can be coded on Sndroid and everything else. Apple gets brand recognition ala "FireWire" and we get a service we want that there no reason to pay more for. 29.00 a month for unlimited texts. Insane. 90% of my friends have iPhones. But messages from my bank, pharmacy,etc go through a non iMessage service. Apple needs to open up the protocol and allow an API gateway so regular SMS messages can get through. Then we can all dump the unlimited text plans or the 30 cents ala carte text plans.

greenyoda 14y ago
"Apple needs to open up the protocol and allow an API gateway so regular SMS messages can get through." Apple creating an API wouldn't accomplish much, since Apple still wouldn't have access to the SMS message streams. The mobile carriers would have to route SMS traffic to Apple's gateway, and they're not likely to agree to that, since SMS is a huge cash cow for them. One possibility would be to cut SMS out entirely, by convincing the senders of these messages (banks, etc.) to connect directly to Apple's API instead of sending SMS. But the problem is that Apple's service is proprietary, and all the people on Android phones will be on competing services with different APIs. So banks would have to figure out how to talk to all these different APIs. This isn't a compelling issue for banks to be spending their efforts on, since any customer who wants to receive their banking alerts without using SMS already can: these alerts are also available via e-mail, which is an open, universal and standardized protocol. An alternate approach would be for Apple to create an e-mail to iMessage gateway that would give each user a dedicated e-mail address that would forward to their iMessage stream (similar to the many e-mail to SMS gateways that currently exist). Users could then subscribe that e-mail address to their banking alerts. Another advantage of avoiding SMS entirely is that it's an unreliable protocol, in which 1-5% of messages are lost[1]. So if your alert is actually important, you may not want to entrust it to SMS in the first place. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SMS#Unreliability https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SMS#Unreliability

hosh 14y ago

Not really tech trends, but rather, product trends. Still interesting. I think the biggest takeaway is: just because your parents are clueless about the generation gap doesn't mean that you are not either. Don't bring in your assumptions. (And following that: tech is now iterating fast enough that a "generation gap" can now be seen among siblings, not just parent-children).

j2labs 14y ago

Keek might make a reasonable example of something do ewhere between facetime and instagram. It's a lot like instagram, but the medium is <36s long videos. Just bringing it up as food for thought. No real point here.

Shank 14y ago

I'm in 11th and I read Hacker News on a daily basis, so I'm a bit outside the general population when it comes to issues like this. With that said, her thoughts on Facebook are echoed by everyone who I've talked to. Many are sick of it, and fewer each day check it regularly. If I need to contact someone, even someone with Facebook on their smartphone, it takes hours to get a reply. If I use SMS I'm acknowledged near instantly.

corporalagumbo 14y ago
I feel like Facebook has become the boring Uncle of our digital lives. Nobody really likes it, except for those blissfully ignorant people who haven't realised how dumb they look posting all the time, but we can't get rid of it. I agree that texting is usually faster than Facebook messaging (though because I use WP7 the line is pretty well blurred between the two for me) but you tend to be Facebook friends with more people than you have phone numbers for and/or text regularly. Maybe this is a little different for you because you are still in school, but as a young adult Facebook is the quick, reliable place where everyone I know is stored. I read a description of the computer desktop as the place which you can always find on your computer, and so the place where unconfident computer users end up storing all of their files. I think Facebook is the equivalent of the desktop for social contacts on the web. Which I think will give it a lot of resilience to unpopularity, so even if no one loves it, it'll probably stick around.
- Shank 14y ago
  I use Facebook as the "universal directory" if I don't have contact details for someone, which is the infuriating part. If I need to contact someone I don't have a phone number or some IM contact for, I go to Facebook and look there. A great analogy would be phone books. I've not found a person who actually likes getting or using them, but they were the best place to find someone's phone number if all you had was a name and a bit of an address.
jzone3 14y ago
I'm in 10th grade, and I have noticed that my friends and I (well especially me) rarely use SMS. 99% of the time we use Facebook messages to communicate.

unimpressive 14y ago

I'm going to break the "Don't mention my age." rule to write this post. Only because here it's relevant. What you use and how you use it has a lot of factors besides age. It has to do with your friends, their friends, where you live, what school you go to or what job you have, etc etc. I'd like to share an anecdote about umwelt. A few days ago, I walked into a coffee shop. I sat in that coffee shop for two hours.[0] When I first walked in my jaw hit the floor as I scanned the room. Everyone had tablets, young, old, there was no common pattern. There was one person I could see reading a physical book, and two graphic designers in the back with Macbooks. My first thought was "Either I'm living in a bubble, or coffee shops are a bubble.". I figured that if this is what it looks like in suburbia, then it must be even crazier elsewhere. That's when it hit me. If silicon valley developers do their work in coffee shops, and all they ever see there is mobile devices, then they'll naturally develop for mobile devices. But then mobile is new, hot, and growing all the time. IIRC mobile sales have already outdone consumer desktop and laptop sales. Are developers choosing mobile because it's new and big, or because they see it in coffee shops all the time? Probably both. They're not exactly mutually exclusive. Just like how you have to ask if consumers are switching to tablets because laptops are too bulky, or because they're more usable, or because that's where the focus of every up and coming developer is right now? Probably a combination of all three and more. All of that might have seemed pretty obvious to you. Well it wasn't to me, heres why: 1. In my circle of friends, everyone still uses desktops or laptops. Having only a laptop seems to be a result of financial concerns, not a lack of demand for a desktop. 2. At my school a handful of people have tablets. Me being one of them. A group of kids asked me what kind of cellphone it was when I first used it in class. 3. Among my friends Facebook seems to be the dominant communication medium, alongside telephone services. I only use the latter. 4. My school has uncommon demographics, The vast vast majority could be described as one or more of the following: Nerd, Hipster, Extreme anime and manga fan, Gamer. So I guess I myself sort of live in a bubble. I don't even own a cellphone. I live on the west coast of the US. Not exactly a remote location. [0]: This was the first time I've ever actually sat down in a coffee shop.

phillmv 14y ago
Things change a lot once you begin to have disposable income. Almost everyone my age has a smartphone.

exodust 14y ago

15 year olds definitely want to have "compatibility with different systems" including the source of their pay packets, allowance, and access to resources - ie old people and their old email. But it turns out email, even if used infrequently, is still important. It's easy to have multiple accounts sit there indefinitely. Not controlled by one fatcat pulling privacy strings and strategizing your online activity. Meanwhile another million blue 'f' logos are printed, each destined for a shopfront window, cash register, door. Beckoning the registration and sign up and sign over of your stuff. In return, FB tells a few advertisers about you and your stuff. And FB also reserves the right to build the mechanics of your social communications, private and public, the particulars of which will be in accordance with Facebook's sole decision and strategy in an advertiser-hungry world... And other things without notice and so on.

zdrtx 14y ago
To be clear, Facebook doesn't tell any advertisers any information about any users. Advertisers tell Facebook what kinds of people they want to see their advertisement, and Facebook shows the advertisement to those kinds of people.
- karambahh 14y ago
  Supposedly :-) I am always amazed at how poorly personalized facebook are for me or my friends. Basically it's always made of 60% "meeting someone from the area" aka some shaddy semi-porn website. I am really curious of the efficient of advertisement on FB. I know some large brand (GM I think?) pulled off FB because they did not see any ROI. I wonder if it holds true worldwide and for smaller brands...

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drwl 14y ago

> real time social web all the major buzz words in one phrase!

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Uhhrrr 14y ago

I think it makes total sense that no one she knows reads blogs. Most kids don't read the paper, or read books for fun. This is not so much devolution of reading habits as democratization of computer usage.

corporalagumbo 14y ago
Yeah. Computing has trickled down from the intellectual elite to the masses. I suspect more curious, analytical and information-seeking attitudes will trickle down in time too.
wildgift 14y ago
This is true, but there are also kids her age who do read the paper, and it's actually a prime age for pleasure reading. His sister probably isn't going to take up reading or writing for reasons other than necessity. SaMo is not a crappy community - it's a wealthy one really - and very well educated, so if she's not interested now, she probably won't be in the future.

SeoxyS 14y ago

That last point about FaceTime sounds like an opportunity for Sean Parker's Airtime.

philwelch 14y ago

FTA: For me, Twitter is predominantly a link discovery service — admittedly, that is a simplified view, but it’s helpful for these purposes — so I followed-up on her Twitter comments by asking where she discovers links. “What do you mean?” She couldn’t even understand what I was asking. I rephrased the question: “What links do you read? What sites do they come from? What blogs?” "I don’t read links. I don’t read blogs. I don’t know. You mean like funny videos on Facebook? Sometimes people post funny links there. But I’m not really interested in anything yet, like you are." Television was a major blow to reading for decades up until the internet, but now even the internet is starting to destroy literacy. It's very unsettling.

corporalagumbo 14y ago
My impression is the exact opposite: I see people reading and debating more than ever thanks to the internet. I think thanks to the internet we are in a golden era of literacy, but we just don't notice it because we're too busy complaining with other highly-literate people on highly debate-focussed websites such at this one about the more obvious non-literary manifestations of popular culture.
- philwelch 14y ago
  One need only look as far as Reddit to see that HN is highly unusual in this respect.
  - corporalagumbo 14y ago
    People were plenty stupid before the Internet. It was just hidden before, now it's all out in the open. Let's just see what happens next - remember, we're only about three to four years into a fully online society :)
    - philwelch 14y ago
      Stupid is one thing. Disinterested in reading is my primary concern.

rdl 14y ago

I don't understand why FaceTime is viewed as expensive. Isn't it free? I guess you pay for data, but 95% of the time I'm on wifi (home, office), and I'd assume schools, wherever kids spend time (coffee shops?), etc. have wifi too.

plorkyeran 14y ago
High schools generally don't have much in the way of WiFi coverage.

jff 14y ago

I wouldn't be too much bothered by what tenth grade kids like, because they don't have any damn money.

corporalagumbo 14y ago
Wow. You must be lost - Hackernews is, as far as I am aware, a site for intelligent, open-minded people who recognise that valuable information may be found in many inconspicuous, non-intuitive locations. People intelligent enough to realise that kids are historically early-adopters and re-shapers of technology, pioneering uses and social integrations which, while dismissed as trivial by ignorant, hidebound adults, often end up exploding into mainstream popularity and defining the future of technology.
- jff 14y ago
  The article describes how these kids are all using free services, and that they won't use the ones that costs money. So I'd say that if you have any business model besides "Ads, ads, glorious ads on our user-generated content!", I think teenagers are probably going to pass by your service, however good it may be.
  - corporalagumbo 14y ago
    That sounds like a very narrow-minded interpretation to me.
  - dpe82 14y ago
    > Ads, ads, glorious ads Is there something wrong with that? Total US advertising expenditures for 2011 were $144 billion[0]. UGC is of course quite difficult to monetize, but it's not impossible. [0] http://kantarmediana.com/intelligence/press/us-advertising-expenditures-increased-08-percent-2011 http://kantarmediana.com/intelligence/press/us-advertising-e...
potatolicious 14y ago
If kids really don't have any spending power, we wouldn't have Fruit Loops, Spongebob Squarepants, Barbie, Disney movies, or Harry Potter. Children drive an enormous amount of consumer spending. Their usage patterns matter. If anything, extracting money from an adult may be easier indirectly by their children than directly.

jhkdesign 14y ago

A few observations: 1. Facebook is trying to stay relevant by copying promising social network features (e.g. Whatsapp, Snapchat, Foursquare, ...) 2. Although Facebook is trying hard, it's having a tough time competing with the new social network because of preconceived notion of what Facebook is. (Facebook is news feed of personal social graph, not ephemeral real-time chat like Snapchat.) More on this: http://www.futureofsocialnetwork.com/2012/12/social-network-as-context.html http://www.futureofsocialnetwork.com/2012/12/social-network-... 3. Although Facebook is having hard time competing with new, it has the big enough network to be the social platform. People still have account because of network-effect.

floatingice 14y ago

This is one if the most interesting articles I've read on HN in a looonnng time. More tech companies should be thinking about this.

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frasierman 14y ago

http://willsmidlein.com/blog/tech-trends/ http://willsmidlein.com/blog/tech-trends/

wildgift 14y ago

Look, some people get into Princeton, and some don't. LOl. People are different, and in my experience, some brainy people like twitter and other link finding services, to find things to READ. We watch instructional videos or download all the awesome lectures that universities have posted. We use facebook, but end up posting links to news stories and even longer things like wikipedia articles and actual papers and prose. We like Reddit and even stackexchange. We love wikipedia. We're a minority. Way more people like to take photos of each other and send them to each other. They like to share photos of the cat, babies, etc. They share inspirational poetry. Even more people just want videophone of some kind, or something like twitter, but sans too much linking. More photos. t.co for everything. I know someone who got internet mainly for consuming porn and maybe some video games. He's an adult, has a college degree, and works with people who wish kids would read more, or be more interested in school, or basically be more like the brainy kids. He didn't go to college because he loved knowledge. He went to get a middle class job, and because his parents went to college. Personally, I was the first to go to college in my family, and went to a good one. I'm a big nerd. My brother and I taught ourselves to program computers. (He's smarter than me, too.) I liked to read. I still mostly read online. I've put up a few left-wing websites, have an almost obligatory anger toward the boss (comes from growing up working class), and still buy books. I just accept that people are different. Some people are into reading, and others aren't. Some people like to think about things, and others are more about looking at people. Some people go with the flow, and others don't.

ubercore 14y ago
I'm not quite sure what statement you're making here? Where does Princeton, or education at all, have to do with what 15 year olds use for technology?