Tenth Grade Tech Trends

Josh Miller wrote Tenth Grade Tech Trends. "Learning from past mistakes, I took some time over the holiday break to ask my [15 year-old] 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."

I found this somewhat interesting. I found out about Facebook years ago because a friend said his teenage daughter though email was how old people communicated. She did everything with MySpace (and I looked at that but thought Facebook was a better fit for me at the time). I've never heard of snapchat and a quick look at their webpage tells me I'm not the target demographic.

Some of the insights are interesting but I think he might be reading too much into some things.

"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."

She probably doesn't read a newspaper either so the above questions seem as useful as asking her about how to better design the New York Times' front page. It's also not valid to say based on this that newspapers are doomed. It strikes me as similar to those people that said Facebook needed a music solution because they were losing that war to MySpace. Different markets.