Newsletter #122 Teen Net Usage = The Future

Created on 23/04/08

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Our last newsletter (19th March, 2008) was "Seven Steps Toward Search Engine Happiness".

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Feature Article

"If you want an honest opinion, ask a child. But if you want an honest look at his future, don't ask him what he wants. Watch what he goes after instead." Annette Hamilton, ZDNet AnchorDesk. This quote came quickly to mind when I read the latest Pew Internet & American Life Project report: Teens and Social Media. www.pewinternet.org.

It was teens who were using social networking sites, instant messaging and other technologies, well before older generations caught on. Many of the things that teens are doing online today, they won’t be doing in 10 years time, but their overall usage patterns won’t change as they become adults.

So what are teens doing? Some of the main findings are:

• 93% of teenagers are online – so pretty much all of them.
• Only 14% of teens send email every day making it the most unimportant form of social communication queried.
• Nearly two thirds (64%) are content creators. They create blogs, work on personal or other Webpages, share artwork or videos online and remix existing content.
• Social networking sites are the hubs of content-creating activity with 55% having a social network profile. Older teens (15-17) are more likely to have such a profile with older girls leading the way with 70% compared with older boys at 57%
• 27% of online teens say they create or work on their own Webpages compared to just 14% of those people 18 and over
• 28% of online teens report that they create their own blog
• Half of all online teens (49%) now read the online journals or blogs of others and this rises to 58% of older teens (15-17).
• Two thirds (66%) of teens with an online profile say they restrict access to it in some way.
• Online teen boys are twice as likely to post video files online, 19% vs 10% for girls
  
  
  

So what does this mean for companies planning their Internet strategies?

• If pretty much all teenagers are online they’ll also be highly connected adults. The Net will be their first port of call for communicating and much of their social contact. They will expect more services and more information to be available online and will take more notice of online information than information from any other source.
  
  
• Email is on the way out as a method of connection, as teens expect to be able to strike up conversations that have instant response. Companies will have to look beyond the standard Website response forms to customer service via text chat, always available telephone operators and maybe even live video links.
  
  
• These connected adults will be used to creating their own content and remixing it with other content from around the Web. Older adults and most companies just don’t have experience of this and will need to adapt.
  
  
• They will also expect to be able to comment on content, products and services created by your company. You’ll need to make sure you provide the facility to allow them to do so, and then listen to what they say as they will be more likely than other adults to want to be involved in your community.

Studies like this one are the best predictors we have of how the Internet will look and be used in the next decade. Ignore it at your peril.

Hot Tips

Newbies

Most people type their queries directly into Google without any punctuation, for example:
the long and winding road
If you were searching for that song however you really want to match the exact phrase and so need to add quotation marks: "the long and winding road", otherwise Google searches for the words individually. In this case you get almost the same result but hopefully you get what I mean.

Power Users

Last newsletter we talked about the hosts file which users can use to supplement (or instead of) the domain name system. What can you use the hosts file for? You can use it to block or filter ads by redirecting references to ad-servers to the local address 127.0.0.1. Developers can also use a hosts file by enabling non-standard domains on a LAN. You could use example.local for accessing Example Company's Intranet, or sample.new for a new version of the sample.com website during testing. The hosts file could look like this:

192.168.1.100 example.local
127.0.0.1 sample.new

Interesting Sites

DontClick.it is a site that means what it says - no clicking allowed! It appears to be a research site to see how people interact with an interface that responds to mouse gestures. It's very well done with some fascinating insights into the history and theory behind the mouse clicking interface. http://www.dontclick.it/

InsiteFul Quotes

"The two most common elements in the universe are Hydrogen and stupidity." Harlan Ellison

You can see our other Quick Quotes on the front page of www.netinsites.com; just refresh the page to see another one randomly selected from our database. Great for presentations or times when you want to appear to be a techno-dude(ss)!

Archives

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Best wishes

Alex Garden

Internet Strategy | Website Design | Website Promotion | Web Text Messaging | Email Newsletters | Online Sports Games | Content Management