Teenagers in high school usually see their friends every day (more so than college - where you're less likely to have all or many of the same classes as your friends), there probably isn't as much desire to use a social network to keep up with what your friends/acquaintances are doing since you're experiencing it with them. After college you're more likely going weeks or months between seeing even your closest friends or family so Facebook is probably a bit more useful/exciting when your older.

That's a huge barrier for Facebook to overcome, especially when a 'cooler' competitor can expand its feature set to meet the students' long-distance relationship needs without any of the stigma that they associate with Facebook.

It is kind of like not needing LinkedIn until you're in college.

In then end, people desire something (access to content and/or interaction), and all that prevents them from having it is being completely truthful in one spot about a question that really doesn't seem that important.

My middle school aged kids have no interest in Facebook at all. Instagram definitely, and texting constantly. I'm sure Snapchat will come soon too.

I'm not sure I'd put to much weight on that. From my personal use and what I've seen people seem to spend longer periods of time on Facebook. Whereas Snapchat requires seconds at a time. When you're asking who used something before school you have to remember these kids likely got out of bed, didn't have time to shower and ran to the bus :) I'd love it if you had also asked about what they did after school the previous day. Of course my evidence isn't very robust either but I don't think you can draw your conclusion from that survey.

The only thing that would prove any of this is real data, which seems to be lacking in every claim....

"This article will not use any studies, data, sources, etc. This is because you can easily get that from any other technology news website and analyze from there. I’m here to provide a different view based off of my life in this “highly coveted” age bracket. That being said, I'm not an expert at this by a long shot and I'm sure there will be data that disproves some of the points I make, but this is just what I've noticed."

Its similar to that fake radar app that claims it detects police radar from your smartphone then at the bottom of the description says "Does not work".

edit: (To explain, I don't think the author was malicious or really at fault. I think everyone trying to draw sweeping conclusions about our generation based on this article are ignoring the "Does Not Work" warning, when it comes to the fact that there is zero sources/data behind this....)

I only know a handful of people (myself included) that believe Snapchat does delete your photos. Everyone else I know believes that Snapchat has some secret database somewhere with all of your photos on it.

I don't think there is a lot of positive bias when he states that, "Everyone he knows believes that Snapchat has a secret database somewhere with all of your photos on it."

I'm not sure where your negative criticism is coming from. This is a single, very well written, anecdote. He EXPLICITLY states that there is almost certainly general data that will disprove everything he says. He makes it super, super clear that this is just a single individuals experience. If anything, he goes overboard in the opening paragraphs trying to disclaim everything he is about to write. Everyone else (including you) is free to write up their own stories, and from those many, many stories, we get a good picture of social media from the teenagers perspective. After all, the plural of anecdote is data.

Either way, the original poster I responded to with the anecdote wasn't even the author of the article, but someone on here who provided another anecdote, but didn't give the same such warning or any indication that they knew what they were saying wasn't an actual relevant argument....

Then it's their own darn faults.

What it does provide is a very clear sense as to how all of these different services end up playing very complimentary roles in an individual's life. Even if the particular services involved have a popularity that waxes or wanes, the broader picture formed by the complex decision making that resolves people's thoughts and feelings into one network or another remains fascinating. And that aspect of social media seems like it's here to stay.

So sure, this perspective may be worthless to you, but most smart people are sophisticated enough to realize that others have perspectives different from theirs. A person designing or developing social networks, for instance, would have to think about the stuff in this post very carefully if they had any hope of getting their own product into the mix. Yes, they would need the macro view too, but in the absence of the direct personal perspective (which is the perspective held by literally every single one of their prospective users), their efforts are guaranteed to fail.

Short version: if you're going to call something "worthless" be sure to include the essential qualifier "to me". Otherwise you just seem ridiculously self centered.

You've repeated this many times so it must really have struck a nerve with you but it's not like this is a recommendation for SnapChat. He thinks it's the most used and he states so, I really don't see a problem with that even if he is best friends with the CEO.

A proper survey or data about app store habits say a lot more than a questionable testimonial. Yet somehow, this little sub-genre of reporting still exists. Its like there's this constant adult neurosis about what teenagers and college students think, especially if your paycheck stems from the spending habits of that demographic. This neurosis lets us overlook a lot of things, the same way people looking for spiritual answers will sometimes flock to a known conman, cult, or abusive religion.

Funny how a lot of us were bright young kids, like you, but have become milquetoast adults falling for the same old tricks. Sounds like you're on the right path though. Don't become us.

For me, one of the most interesting things about this piece was the total bafflement with Twitter. Not that they didn't like it, they just didn't get it. At the same time, concerns about professional life were largely restricted to "Who will be the first to hire me and will my social life be used against me?"

In other words, the way that a lot of Twitter users treat the service as a huge and never-ending professional conference (with frequent flurries from actual conferences) is totally lost on people too young to have reached this stage in their working lives.

My takeaway from this is not "Kids don't use Twitter, Twitter must be doomed". It's that Twitter is for grownups (mostly), and that it's normal for people to age out of some networks and into others, just like they age into and out of music, cars, clothes, jobs, neighborhoods, and pretty much every other aspect of cultural life.

It's not that there's anything wrong with the basic idea - it's just that Twitter, the company, constantly wants to make it into something it isn't. And invariably fails at that.

I now use it for my geeky posts, and occasionally, rarely, to check my feed for interesting tweets from the masters of the startup scene.