Tenth Grade Tech Trends

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?

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.

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.

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-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.

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.