Wednesday, January 2, 2013

What The Tech World Looks Like To A Teen

Think you have a pretty good idea of what's coming next in tech? Then you probably haven't talked to a teen recently.



Via: snapchat.com


Josh Miller is the co-founder of Branch. This post originally appeared on Medium, and is reprinted here with the author's permission.


A few months ago, my fifteen-year-old sister told me that Snapchat was going to be the next Instagram. Many months before that she told me that Instagram was being used by her peers as much as Facebook. Both times I snickered.


Learning from past mistakes, I took some time over the holiday break to ask my sister many, many questions about how her and her friends are using technology. Below I’ve shared some of the more interesting observations about Instragram, Facebook, Instant Messaging, Snapchat, Tumblr, Twitter, and FaceTime. I hope you’ll find them as informative, surprising, and humbling as I did.


Looking at her Instagram feed, I noticed that the vast majority of photos were of people – not beautiful views, objects, or experiences. This is in stark contrast to what the people I follow on Instagram take photos of, and very analogous to the photos that appear in my Facebook Newsfeed.


My takeaway: Facebook was smart to buy Instagram.


She mentioned that she tries to visit Facebook as infrequently as possible. “It’s addicting,” she bemoaned, “you end up getting lost in it and I don’t like that.” I found this perspective interesting. Facebook is clearly doing a good job delivering relevant content, yet its users (at least this one) feel poorly when they use the service. Related, she mentioned that she only visits Facebook after her Instagram Feed updates have been exhausted.


My takeaway: Facebook may have an irreversibly bad brand.




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