Tenth Grade Tech Trends

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.<p>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.

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.<p>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.

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.<p>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&#38;T and possibly others is the barrier.<p>I have a 4gs and can't use FaceTime over the cellular network without paying AT&#38;T more money or losing my unlimited plan. So I don't use it.<p>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&#38;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.<p>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.

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.<p>Edit:<p>&#62;&#62; "... my friends and I used Myspace in middle school, and we too abandoned it (for Facebook) once we reached high school"<p>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?<p>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.

"she swore all of her friends would use if one of my “entrepreneur friends” built it: a FaceTime-esque app that’s free."<p>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?

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.<p>The real drawback to FaceTime is that it's iOS/MacOS only.

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?<p>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?

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.

I'm also a 15 years old teenager living in Argentina, but here things are somewhat different.<p>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.<p>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).<p>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.<p>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.<p>What people <i></i>really<i></i> 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.<p>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.<p>Other services? Some people use Twitter, but not really; mostly teenagers following One Direction and Justin Bieber.<p>Blogging? Nah, no one reads blogs: they don't like reading anything larger than a couple lines of text (I think this: <a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1945/07/as-we-may-think/303881/" rel="nofollow">http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1945/07/as-we-ma...</a> can be relevant).<p>Youtube... they like dumb vlogs and some people like gameplays, I find this kind of videos very annoying and dumb.<p>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...<p>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 <i></i>really<i></i> 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.<p>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.

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.<p>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.

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?!<p>Separately - isn't Skype basically Facetime over 3G/4G (and not just wi-fi)? What is Skype lacking here?

Interesting to me are the generational service abandonment patterns.<p>The author mentions abandoning MySpace moving into highschool like the subject graduates past Tumblr.<p>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.

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.<p>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.<p>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.

FTA:<p><i>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><p><i>"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."</i><p>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.

I'm going to break the "Don't mention my age." rule to write this post. Only because here it's relevant.<p>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.<p>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.".<p>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.<p>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.<p>All of that might have seemed pretty obvious to you. Well it wasn't to me, heres why:<p>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.<p>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.<p>3. Among my friends Facebook seems to be the dominant communication medium, alongside telephone services. I only use the latter.<p>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.<p>I live on the west coast of the US. Not exactly a remote location.<p>[0]: This was the first time I've ever actually sat down in a coffee shop.

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.

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

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.

Look, some people get into Princeton, and some don't. LOl.<p>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.<p>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.<p>Even more people just want videophone of some kind, or something like twitter, but sans too much linking. More photos. t.co for everything.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.

My take on social Internet trends and technology seems to be everything is rushing towards mobility and has been since about 2004.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.

A few observations:<p>1. Facebook is trying to stay relevant by copying promising social network features (e.g. Whatsapp, Snapchat, Foursquare, ...)<p>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: <a href="http://www.futureofsocialnetwork.com/2012/12/social-network-as-context.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.futureofsocialnetwork.com/2012/12/social-network-...</a><p>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.

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.<p>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.<p>I would take any assertion of how people use social media with a big grain of salt.

Keek might make a reasonable example of something do ewhere between facetime and instagram. It's a lot like instagram, but the medium is &#60;36s long videos.<p>Just bringing it up as food for thought. No real point here.

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.<p>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.<p>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.

Not really tech trends, but rather, product trends. Still interesting.<p>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.<p>(And following that: tech is now iterating fast enough that a "generation gap" can now be seen among siblings, not just parent-children).

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.

<a href="http://willsmidlein.com/blog/tech-trends/" rel="nofollow">http://willsmidlein.com/blog/tech-trends/</a>

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

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

&#62; “entrepreneur friends”<p>Instead of /nerds/ or some such is quite a nice touch.

&#62; real time social web all the major buzz words in one phrase!