Sitting on the deck the other evening with my 24 year-old daughter and her boyfriend, a San Francisco entrepreneur working on a real estate/apartment finder app — while I grilled dinner I also grilled them on social media trends within their social and professional circles. Both are digitally driven individuals who have known a world that always had an Internet. He’s on a divided platform of MacAir and Android phone, she’s a follower of the Apple Holy Trinity of MacAir, iPhone5 and iPad2.
- Both are Gmail users. She left Yahoo. And despite the Apple hardware, does not use Apple cloud services or email.
- Both use Snapchat
- Dropbox
- Are not fans of iTunes
- Both dispute the popular myth of twenty-somethings fleeing Facebook as it gets infested by their parents. “Can’t survive without it, though everyone disses it and says they are going to cancel their accounts,” said he.
- Twitter is not a big thing for them personally, but he’s respectful of its marketing power
- He is a content marketing practitioner and showed me an infographic developed with his PR firm to support his app launch
- Both admit to being overwhelmed by the proliferation of social apps, networks, etc.
- I didn’t ask about Google + usage.
- Laptop and tablet use was pretty low during their ten day vacation. Phones were consulted constantly with few phone calls observed.
Interesting points I took away from this survey sample of two are:
- Both are very concerned about personal information security, hence the quick adoption of Snapchat which makes an image expire and notifies the sender if a recipient takes a screen shot.
- Facebook is tired, but central to their sharing and personal network maintenance. I thought they would long gone from there.
- Both said they are tired of keeping up with all the options and new technology available to them
How did they feel about Yahoo! shutting down Alta Vista?
http://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2013/07/08/yahoo-shuts-down-internet-relic-altavista/2499419/
I have to imagine they were pretty traumatized by this 🙂
David — I frequently do this exercise with my nieces and nephews (my kids are still lil ones – although my 3 year old is a whiz on the iPad).
Instagram is the one thing that pops significantly higher with my 13-19 year old nieces/nephews
I’ve observed Instagram use in the 10 – 14 year old crowd. Despite Windows Phone not having an Instagram app – she wanted a Nokia Lumia 928.
Instagram burned my daughter when a photo from her “private” content was sent anonymously to her former employer out of some twisted sense of vengeance by a person unknown. The level of paranoia in the net-gen is huge and leads to two trends:
1. unshareable, private content like snapchat
2. work-around apps that bypass the Man and give free options