That last trend of people using Facebook less and Instagram more bolsters the justification for Instagram's large purchase. I wouldn't be surprised if Zuck can see that trend from their internal data, and the community at HN hasn't noticed it yet because it's happening with the younger generation first.
I was talking to my daughter (17) about this. As others have said, Facebook is out, and Twitter, Instagram, and Tumblr are in. The one comment about Facebook that stood out: "It's been taken over by moms."
Do they tend to keep private profiles, use pseudonymns or just broadcast it completely publicly with twitter? I don't recall twitter having 'friend' only posts.
Anecdotally, no. IMO, Twitter is half social engagement, half narcissism. You can make your account private, but that would void the narcissistic half.
I've worked with youth in various churches the past decade, and it is very interesting to see the way they approach technology. They have perhaps a maximum of 3 years attention on any given technology, except a precious few that have always been there (email, SMS). As others have pointed out, right now Instagram and Tumblr are popular, and Twitter seems only popular for those near cities; in my rural area Twitter was only popular for maybe half a year or so before it died out. Facebook is still used, but you mainly see them posting stuff for family these days (not interacting with peers). Pinterest is very popular with the girls, but the guys get made fun of when they use it.
More interestingly, I'm recently seeing a love for Google again, especially with Hangouts. I wouldn't be surprised if this were the next big thing with teens.
I would be surprised if he WEREN'T using his data to do that! He has age, location, social graph and referrer headers - I'm pretty sure he can use this to predict the next big trend at least a few months before the rest of us.
I thought the Facebook comment was pretty telling. I'm not even sure what FB's target demographics are, but the sense I got from the OP was Facebook is just a scene which was cool for a while but is now passe and they're moving on to other social networks.
It would seem FB for the younger folks has simply run its course as trend.
I think the crankiness will be justified when HN fills up with "I'm a 15-year old who just made this app/website/blog post", but until then it just strikes me as a bit po-faced. No offence, this might be the first time you've had this particular grumble, but someone seems to do it every time a post like this hits the front page.
Incidentally, I agree with you on the blog post. The other stuff this kid's doing - quite impressive really! Wish him the best of luck. I'd LOVE to see a better thought-out follow up post along the same lines. It makes me think back to when I was his age and completely immersed in all the new, cool technology happenings - so many things I instinctively knew were 'right' and about to go massive (and they did), so many things that weren't even products that I assumed were (and later became)... Basically, I want to consult with my teenage self and use that advice to invest time/money!
> Basically, I want to consult with my teenage self and use that advice to invest time/money!
You and me both. As the eldest child, it was my job to walk the dog three times a day during school holidays. Most of the time I'd go alone. During those endless walks along riverbanks, through fields and down twisty country lanes I'd think and invent and create in my head. It was wonderful.
I remember dreaming up a multi-player game set in space, where every character would be played by another real person. You'd join a ship's crew and go exploring a gigantic galaxy. I was inspired, of course, by Elite on the school BBC and Star Trek; by the 9600 baud modem my Dad 'borrowed' from work and the bulletin boards it gave me access to; and by a dreamy child's desire for complete and total escape. A good fifteen years later Eve Online came out and I got my wish, just as I was settling into a busy career and saving for my first house. I've never even downloaded it.
Then there's the sketches I made in the mid '80s for a handheld computer with a touch-screen interface that would communicate, via radio, with transceivers in public buildings to give people directions and information. There was even messaging, with a kind of dead-letter-drop store-and-forward system that carried data between the transceivers on devices themselves, like a weird cross between bittorrent and the Royal Mail. I don't think I'd even heard of email at that point.
I came up with so much on those long walks. Nearly all of it has been developed in some form or other, never exactly as I imagined but always better in some ways and worse in others.
For me it's one of the most heartbreaking things about growing up: there's no time to indulge in exploration for its own sake. I can't focus my entire brain on a single thing for any length of time at all. If I could, if only I could.
Elite and Star Trek - sounds we had similar childhoods! I never did have a dog though...
I'm publicly rather derisive (in a joking way) about adults playing computer games but I know in my heart of hearts that if Eve (or indeed the new similar ones that are currently under development) is all it's cracked up to be it would be a really REALLY bad idea for me to ever try them.
As a rule, I steer clear of heroin, crack and Elite-type MMORPGs... ;)
It is the first time I've had this grumble, but I migrated here from Reddit to escape the onslaught of everybody-look-at-meeeeee-I'm-a-teenager!!! Apologies if I come across as grumpy; I guess others found more value in the post than I did.
One cynical way to look at it: it's free market research from a high-spending demographic that's completely impenetrable to outsiders. I'm grateful for it, although I share your wary distaste of age-declaring youths. (Shades of those irritating, high-achieving 21 year olds who declare with no sense of irony that they've done more than people twice their age.)
>As a sidenote, I've noticed that teenagers love to declare their age when posting on the internet, as if their youth entitles them to an audience.
I get that feeling sometimes. I always feel bad about it afterwards. Don't worry, he'll regret it later.
Source: I'm 16. I've mentioned my age on the Internet many times, every time I felt like a dick about it later.
PS: This kids writing annoyed me, I know I must be doing something annoying with mine that I'm not noticing, please point it out to me; thank you in advance.
I thought it was very interesting. As for being a unique perspective, why would I care about uniqueness? I care about it being informative to ME, and since I'm nowhere near 16 (and we'll just leave it at that), I'm interested in hearing about what is COMMON KNOWLEDGE, therefore NOT unique, to countless kids his age---an age I didn't have to guess at because he did me the favor of telling us.
If there's an element of, "look at me" in his headline, how is that different from every other headline on HN and every other news site? The headline tells you what the "hook" is, and if you aren't interested, move on to the next hook.
And if your point is that the site is cluttered with contributions announcing a kid's age, well how many more contributions are there announcing, "well, that wasn't very interesting to me"?
To the OP: You did fine, kid. All publishers in all media get the approval of only a fraction of their potential audience. The best anyone ever does is to interest a small sliver of humanity. Listen to feedback, but be aware that it will be all over the map, from "Love it, do more!," to "Hate it, shut up!", to stone silence and background crickets. You can't follow all of it; just consider your options, adapt as you see fit, and keep going.
Interesting but this screams white upper class. If I went back to my middle or high school, (Madison WI, which is hardly as diverse as other areas) I don't think it would be the case that every 8th grader has an iPhone or iPod touch.
That's a good point. My school is often criticized as being a white upper class school, mainly because of it's location in my city. I thought about trying to mention this in my article, and in hindsight should have.
I'm as much a grammar-and-spelling nazi as anyone and can quote you chapter and verse the difference between it's and its, your and you're, effect and affect - but considering I've misused every one of these within the last week in email and sundry comments scattered across the interwebs, I'd argue this is not much more than "sometimes we all type fast and fuck up" ;)
It's a testament to the speed at which technology moves that, despite being not very much older than the author (he's 16, I'm 23), I feel separated by a significant age gap. I'm still often shocked that Youtube can afford all the bandwidth required for streaming video; he barely remembers the world where unlimited streaming video wasn't the norm.
> I'm still often shocked that Youtube can afford all the bandwidth required for streaming video; he barely remembers the world where unlimited streaming video wasn't the norm.
You know, looking back it's silly, but when Youtube came out and started getting attention (I was still in school, so this must've been 2004 or so), I remember thinking to myself "so what?" -- the idea that it was novel just never occurred to me.
Back in 2002-2003, I ran a little startup (at 14-15) that did online music streaming. Built around a little PHP (later C++) daemon, you could set up playlists on the site and then connect to an icecast stream to play that playlist from any device you wanted. The music was ripped from CDs that my friends and I had, and we even added advertisements every X songs or N minutes. It eventually failed due to not being able to raise money to get licensing rights (my dad was running the business side and simply had no clue, but neither did I at the time), but it was just... no big deal to me. I had no idea that it was supposed to be a hard thing to do until a few years later, when I ended up working for MP3tunes trying to build the first online music locker.
I always just assumed that the trend towards storage and bandwidth being "free" was going to move fast enough that anything I could come up with would Just Work (TM).
Reading this brought a smile to my face. It took me back to the days of AIM chats, the silly screennames, Casio messagers that we could program to work as remotes for the school TVs to baffle teachers, et al...
I never really considered how technology was evolving during that time of my life, but it definitely was, and I'm getting nostalgic just thinking about it :)
I still have my PalmOS-powered Sony PDA with it's infrared transmitter and remote control program. It was so much fun to mess up the television and change the channel.
I'm twenty - four years older than the author. Pretty crazy to compare our experiences...
5th grade (1/2): Everyone hangs out on Neopets, lots of people are excited about the GameCube. First time I ever heard of Google.
6th grade (2/3): Neopets is still popular (but popularity is starting to wane), people hang out on AIM, some start getting cell phones. lots of students carry their CD players to school and wear their headphones whenever they can.
7th grade (3/4): iPod Mini is the "hot device", more people have cell phones. everyone hangs out in AIM chat rooms.
8th grade (4/5): iPod Mini still in, most people now have cell phones. nerdy friends start playing World of Warcraft (some never stop, stealing to support the habit). Not many people know / care what MySpace is. A few people have gmail accounts.
9th grade (5/6): Everyone has MySpace. Most people are now using gmail. A few friends have blogs / Facebook. People torrent everything.
10th grade (6/7): MySpace is the hub of all social activity. Some start using Facebook once in a while. A few people create Twitter accounts. Only one or two rich kids have iPhones - they are teased mercilessly.
As a fellow 16 Year old I too have noticed a trend, especially in the popular iOS games. Last spring it was Temple Run then Draw Something. The game going through the school now is Bike Race. If you guys have any questions about what trends kids at my school are following feel free to ask but it's pretty much on par with the original article.
Advice from a 30 year old: Go learn to code now. At a minimum know HTML/CSS/JS. It takes 10,000 hours of practice to master something. Cut your teeth in high school and college. When you get out, you'll be incredibly hirable because you'll actually know how to get things done and launched. College doesn't (usually) teach you that.
Need help getting started? Find a small company in your town that needs help with their website. Offer to do it for $10-$20/hour. You'll build up your resume and portfolio in a single go.
Sorry for unsolicited advice - just cheering you on!
Thanks, I actually began teaching myself HTML and CSS two years ago and a few months after, I learned PHP. I created a few projects and feel PHP is currently my strongest language. I'm now learning RoR and taking a Java class in my High School but it's fairly easy because I already have some experience with C++. I'm also in an HTML class currently (not my choice) and the teacher recognized that I already know the curriculum so she lets me use her Lyna.com subscription to learn things that interest me (currently RoR). My first impressions of RoR are that it's awesome! Each video I watch I think to myself, "Wow, this simplifies some of the things I used to do in PHP immensely." Anyways thank you for the advice, I definitely plan on going to college and I've already been looking at some schools. I've also already created a few websites for some local businesses. I believe the company MediaFire is actually based in my town so I was considering possibly reaching out and asking them if I could be some sort of intern. Thanks for the comment!
They're leaving Facebook because their parents (and parent's friends) are now on Facebook and are friending them. Sure, there's privacy settings and groups, but what teenager wants to hang out at the same place as their mom?
That may be a small part of the reason, but here are some other reasons I would like to propose:
1. Up until a few weeks (months) ago Facebook's iPhone app was complete shit. My younger highschool brother (and all his friends) who are not techies in any sense, always complained about how it sucks. One time I even asked them why they switched to Instagram, and they told me the app works much better than the Facebook app and it's a lot more simple to just post pics/browse. That brings me to my next point.
2. Facebook has grown to the point where it doesn't know what it wants to be. Kind of like myspace was trying to do everything, Facebook is in a similar position (except their products actually work). Instagram specializes in just photos, and makes it easy to use. There is no other crap to get in the way, you upload pics, like them, and comment on them. That's it. Twitter specializes in just short, to-the-point comments. Where does that leave Facebook?
3. Facebook is establishing itself as a kind of social media aggregate. When I post anything to twitter, instagram, or tumblr, it automatically gets posted to my Facebook. But I rarely ever post anything directly on Facebook. From my experience, nobody is leaving Facebook, they just use it less. And as a side not, I think Facebook's strongest features are Groups and Events, I use those two features more than anything else. It is so easy to create groups and invite people, it's awesome.
4. Instagram has cool photo filters that make it very easy to make your photos look "cool" and cover up any imperfections in the pictures. Take any shitty picture and apply a filter, all of a sudden it doesn't look too bad. Sure it looks generic, but it doesn't look like complete crap (most of the time).
I think as social networks grow people need to periodically retrench to increase the signal (close friends, crushes) to noise (mom, zynga spam) ratio. FB's big problem here is the egalitarianism of friend status. Twitter has the same problem. G+ has more flexibility but ultimately relies on increased user effort.
The eventual winner in the space may well be whoever solves this: automatically figuring out which friends are more important to the user, making that measure invisible to users, adjusting it appropriately over time and then filtering to show everything from the most important as well as important updates from less important people while still allowing the user to see less important stuff from the less important people. The eventual winner could also be FB just on sheer forward momentum, size and how deep their hooks are into everyone.
I wonder if increasing bandwidth has also played a role in FB's declining engagement. FB was built as a pics and text based site but long term the trends will move away from this. Yeah it does video and music and everything else but they are stapled on. Over the past year I've watched my wife use FB less and less each night and things like skype and netflix more and more.
What if I told you that people use these services in different ways?
My usage patterns are quite different from yours. Facebook is my primary service. I don't post on Twitter at all, and I rarely even check it, but sometimes I'll retweet something. I have friends that use twitter a ton, but they're actually the few power users. The majority of my friends either don't have a twitter or never post at all.
I also use Instagram very sparingly. I have an account but that was just to see what the hype was all about. I've posted a couple of pictures but a majority of my pictures and albums go on Facebook, where I can tag my friends, and have the vast amount of my friends see it in their feeds. A lot of my friend do have Instagram account but either they use it a lot or they don't use it at all, so again, it varies between those extremes. Those that post their pictures to Instagram, also post their pictures to Facebook, and since Facebook owns Instagram, I feel like it's a win-win for them (driving traffic in both places). They also recently blocked out twitter, so there's that too.
I actually think people are using Facebook more than ever from what I've seen. It's trying to do everything, but at the same time, it's doing everything well. It's powerful, and all your friends are on it.
The iOS app used to suck but it's actually one of the best apps I've seen now. It's super duper fast and they are continually adding functionality to it. Combining the FB and Messenger apps was such an awesome change and I haven't heard people complain about the iOS app ever since the redesign. I still hear complaints about the Android one though, and they definitely are working on that.
So yeah, I think different types of people use these platforms in different ways, but at the core they're all using Facebook, and also Facebook Connect, so I don't think FB is having an identity crisis at all.
EDIT: Another point I'd like to make is that above I pointed out how a lot of users use services like Instagram or Twitter in an "All or Nothing" manner. However I think we can agree that people on Facebook use it on a much wider scale. However,the important thing is, you don't have clustering at the extremes. More importantly, you don't have the clustering at the "Nothing" end. There are some people who don't have Facebook, but those that do, tend to use it in SOME manner in varying degrees which works out to FB's advantage.
Here's a hypothesis partly based on facts in the article: The trend setters are early adopters and the power of the network effects sees quick adoption of the new trends.
If true, it's not about pivoting, but figuring out how to connect with the relevant trend setters.
As someone who only recently graduated high school, many of the trends are ones I saw as well, but many I also did not see.
At my school Google Talk ("gtalk") was as popular as Facebook chat. It is still used, but I personally prefer FB chat (for convenience). Not many people from my high school have a Twitter account, and many still don't. Even fewer use it regularly. I do see more and more friends using it though. I only use it because I'm involved in the tech scene. Quite a few people have Instagram accounts (about a third of my FB friends), and use it frequently. The only shift I see going on is that more of my friends are posting photos on Instagram than they used to on FB. But everything else gets posted on FB.
Maybe some of this truly is due to a difference in generations (only a couple of years).
I'm not sure, maybe it's a more fundamental thing.
It was 8 years ago when I was in high school, and back then everybody used AIM (AIM profiles anyone?). And before that, kids in the 80's used BBS's. I guess kids today use 'gtalk'.
It seems teenagers at a certain age just really want to be able to talk exclusively amongst friends, away from parents and prying public eyes.
Kids in the 80s used telephones. Very few people knew what a BBS was and had the means to get on a BBS. I certainly didn't know anyone that was using a modem in the 80s.
I have been on Twitter since the beginning but I have no idea why people use it. The length restriction is totally lame, UX is rough, and it seems infested with wannabe's (followers), selfish people that live to share their lives with hashtags and pics of innane shit, Ashton, self-proclaimed "social media experts"), and hookers. Facebook has old people, and I'm one of 'em.
To me, Twitter seems more compatible with the older internet user's view that what you do on the internet should, if you want it to be, be somewhat anonymous. Or at least feel that way.
I've noticed that in the past few years so many different services built around sharing, liking, and commenting on images from another person have evolved (and maintained momentum). They don't seem to be doing anything special are technologically exciting, but they just keep proliferating.
