Tenth Grade Tech Trends - Product Design

My daughter is 13....I would add a couple of thoughts. Tumblr is can also be viewed as a 'community' site. My daughter has friends from around the world formed on Tumblr around common interests (mostly music and television).

Also, many her age (moving to high school next year) are already over Facebook. This is going to be a huge problem for FB.

Having an iPhone is NOT a status symbol, but rather a necessity because of the lock in of iMessage and FaceTime. SnapChat is the first dent in that armor and a service that can displace that lock in will also be a huge threat to Apple.

And yes, SnapChat is NOT a sexting app. Everyone uses it. Its how they would act if they were home alone with friends without supervision: being kids.

Christopher Mathews

I definitely agree, I think that Tumblr serves it's purpose well, a good friend found his YouTube fan base there. There's a strong community there, but it's a very different type of community I think, and also generally younger.

I'm actually looking forward to the death of Facebook, personally.

I haven't jumped on board with SnapChat or Poke, I don't have any friends that use it, or not that I know of at least. I do know a few friends who referenced it to sexting app and I must admit it sounds like the perfect app for it BUT I am glad to hear it is being used in a better way!

My biggest concern with this article was that 10th graders aren't reading blogs. I can't remember if I read blogs at that age, but it concerns me that they aren't.

Zain Shah

On the note of wider perspective, I think what's interesting is the timeline for all of this. Looking into it, SnapChat appears to have initially exploded among high school students, where it was failing amongst the founders' peers. My own brother (13) has only just become enamored with Minecraft, where it became popular with my own peers almost 2 years ago.
As far as the life of these products is concerned, it seems they persist mostly through these different use cycles. The death seems impending, like you said, because products that persist invoke a new cycle where it was thought they may have had their last.

Rev. Bitchell

Cool post. This was how I found Branch so I get the motive. I started and folded a social media venture a few years ago (Linkspank) and this reminds me in a good way of that process.

I think Zain is right on, too. Points to a specific mechanism whereby luck can aid a well-tended product. Maybe an area is bygone, or maybe it's specific to this space, but we have a recurring pattern in which cognizant inventors don't know how their inventions will be used.