I agree with the headline, but the argument is crap.
Kids aren't reliable predictors because of a few fundamental lifestyle differences with adults: they don't spend much of their day working away from their friends, and their social network is usually within physically short range. For kids, everything in their lives happens within a short space of time within a small radius.
What works for kids may never work for adults, including the adults they will become, and vice versa.
So it's hard to tell whether the popularity of something amongst kids is a sign of a social change, or just a kids thing. (The latter not necessarily making it a fad, it could work for multiple generations of kids.)
Of course the even less reliable interpreters of such signs are old school dead tree journalists...
I would agree with your list with one critical addition... kids primarily only socialize with kids +/- about one year of age, which is critical because all their friends know, understand, and probably like the same idiotic clothing/music/media/tech fads they like, simply because they're the same age and grew up together in the same location. Kids are strictly uni-cultural. There is just The Culture (apologies to ian banks).
On the other hand adult social areas like HN cover from lower teens to retired and are international (even though HN is mostly SV)
So when I was a HS senior, 100% of my friends knew about, and most of them liked, the same idiotic music and clothing I liked. On the other hand, on HN only a tiny fraction of the audience would even recognize certain band names I thought were cool.
The lack of individuality of kids has enormous social media implications. Inherently there are going to be social media fads which work very well among identical interchangeable kids that are simply impossible for multicultural adults to understand.
Not just "short space of time small radius" but also nearly identical age/maturity level and very similar socioeconomic class and basically mono-cultural.
In other words high school and college are pretty much the opposite of the real world, which is not exactly news, but...
> kids primarily only socialize with kids +/- about one year of age
This was a huge realization for me after getting into the "real world". I suddenly had coworkers who had kids as old as I am. At times I felt like I had more in common with their kids than them, because they would mention things that happened before I was even born. I had worked at other jobs before, but excluding the managers, everyone was around my age.
In school, even 5 years seemed like a huge gap--"Wow, he's in college, I'm still in High School!", doesn't seem like that much.
Another point about kid vs adult socialization is as a HS kid approx 50% of my classmates were in my possible dating pool, whereas entering the adult world the possible dating pool evaporated to perhaps 1% or so of my coworkers and general social network, because so many are happily married, three times my age, sausagefest male:female ratio, whatever.
So showing off to your social network to get dating attention suddenly becomes pretty much worthless once you're not a kid anymore, which has a pretty big impact.
Other things that kids have flocked to that haven't quite panned out as long-term, large-impact businesses: Formspring, Livejournal, Xanga, Chatroulette, Fart sound apps, snap bracelets
There's nothing inherently wise about what a kid thinks is a worthwhile thing to do. I can only guess that those who target them know the power of peer pressure, so if you get many kids roped into your product, then you'll get many, many kids -- and presumably, their parents. Other than that, hard to see the wisdom in pre-adult crowds.
As a 16 year old, the main use for Snapchat is a photo sharing service. Students take a picture of themselves, caption it, and send it to their friend(s). Think of IM but with a photo attached to each message. However, the conversation is based off of a photo, and only used for short conversations. Awkward phrasing but get what I mean?
However, at the same time, teens are more willing to send racy photos if sent over snapchat. They just view this as an added bonus, not the core feature though.
The draw to snapchat seems to be the ephemeral nature of the communications. Both Facebook and Google have taken the path that everything you ever put online should be saved forever and shared with everyone.
Snapchat is very much the opposite Pictures and conversations are with specific people, and meant to be thrown away. It seems like this leads people to be more open, more interesting and less worried about inappropriate (or drunken) messages. Screenshots can be a problem, but it's definitely not on the same level of risk as drunken Facebook posts.
I wonder why more people don't look into Facebook Poke, which explicitly guarantees the encryption keys to your content will be deleted after two days, unless there's some kind of legal order to the contrary.
Is that how kids use it? Me and my friends are a lot older but we also use it as a photo sharing service - for sharing random stuff from your day, not on yourself.
So, it sounds like you're saying a fundamental use case is "sending illegal pictures", which seems like it will eventually result in a devastating lawsuit / prosecution.
That might happen if their privacy/security systems fail and everybody's dick pics are exposed. They don't store data and probably actively purge it, but they might be eavesdropped.
That's almost certainly already happening, though.
Any minute now, all of this inconvenient, annoying change will stop and things will go back to the way they used to be, when adults writing for newspapers headquartered in New York decided what people think!
Something is wrong with the premise of this article.
It goes on to say that most companies that mad it huge were not "initially popular" with young people. But that is a bit of a sleight of hand for two reasons: (1) many of those businesses were <invented> or revolutionized by young people or students; and (2) it ignores the role that young people played in the discovery/momentum/tipping point to their widespread adoption. In otherwords, the two most critical parts of their value realization. Lastly (3) is the category of items that were or are only relevant in the land where (1) and (2) already happend. These are essentially "derivative works" in terms of their core value. Things like LinkedIn (derives value from FB proven use case); and Gmail (widely adopted and propogated through google) etc. come readily to mind. Out of context, they would likely be worth an order of magnitude less than they are perceived today.
Once you eliminate all that, there is really not much left in the article. The premise and idea may still have value, but whatever value that is must be found using different examples and explanartions, IMHO.
> There is only one problem with elevating young people's tastes this way: Kids are often wrong. There is little evidence to support the idea that the youth have any closer insight on the future than the rest of us do.
And we grew out as kids and we actually were the one pushed social network and youtube to its fullness. High school kids and young college undergraduates are kids right? I remember Youtube back in 2005 when I was a freshman in HS.
I agree that buying snapchat is a risky investment. In fact, I am not really sure if that's going to make Facebook stronger. What is Facebook lacking? One of my friends today said "John I like the new Facebook messenger update. It's pretty!" I agree with my friend the messenger app is getting better. But what is taking Facebook down?
It's the way we share photo and videos. Frankly as someone who tries to become a successful security engineer, I can be lazy and agree to FB tracking me as long as my money isn't stolen. I can accept that and try to keep as little sensitive personal data like whether I am still a virgin away from the Internet. I can do that. Kids like me just want to enjoy socializing with friends and the Internet as much as possible.
So if you own things like Instgram or whatever social app you have, integrate that fully into your product. Why is GIF still not supported in Facebook? I heard they used to support gif in the early days of Facebook.
I am not saying there is an easy solution. I don't know and don't think anyone has any idea what would be the coolest yet functional comfortable interface Facebook should have. We need to focus on what people want to see. Facebook, GMail they are just becoming everyday's gadget. It is not exciting. Snapshot is exciting, maybe. Maybe it will continue but I know people soon or later will change to another one. We need to look at what FB messenger can't do that snapchat can.
>And we grew out as kids and we actually were the one pushed social network and youtube to its fullness.
Not really. Youtube catters to all demographics and all ages. If there ever was a social network to speak to 50+ and 60+ as well as 20+ this would be it.
So, no, there wasn't some swarth of "high school kids" and "young college undergraduates" pushing it to its fullness (what would that be?)
The first popular youtubers back in '06 absolutely were "some swarth of "high school kids" and "young college undergraduates"". It found its way to other demographics and ages later.
One side of the argument is virtually all of the users are a multicultural swath of humanity, mostly adults.
The other side of the argument is the largest unicultural subgroup of users was in 2006 HS/Uni kids, maybe as much as 5% of total users. The key being they were the largest single unicultural group.
Both arguments are simultaneously true. There is no point repeating the two true statements to the "opposite" side.
If you prefer a numerical argument, you've got 1K subgroups with 1K members each with little overlap, and one 10K member subgroup. The vast majority of the 1010K members are not in the 10K subgroup but are members of one of many 1K sized subgroups, and it is also simultaneously true that one subgroup is 10x the size of every other subgroup.
> I remember Youtube back in 2005 when I was a freshman in HS.
To be fair, most will remember being introduced to it in that year. Youtube became a household name in 2005 after the Lazy Sunday video, with much fanfare, was published on the service and it became essentially the defacto place to watch it.
I'm inclined to believe that productions by kids maintained the interest in the service beyond that point, but it was content produced by adults that popularized it in the first place. With possibly the exception of Facebook, I think you could say the same about most social networking services. Twitter only became interesting to the general public after adult celebrities started contributing. Myspace was popularized by adults promoting their musical groups.
> What is Facebook lacking?
A monopoly on photo sharing. Anyone who can take that traffic away increases the risks of taking people away from Facebook completely, and that is a huge risk for them. The insane valuations for these companies (Snapchat, Instagram, etc.) are cheap compared to having everyone leave Facebook for another service.
I think kids can be reliable tech predictors, but you have to look at the service and why the kids like it. Is it something that also translates reasonably with adults?
Facebook started with college kids, and the value seemed obvious to me at the time. I was not surprised at all that people continued to use it after college and that other adults joined when it opened up.
Snapchat on the other hand, doesn't seem to have the same kind of value proposition. The thing it seems to be used for is teenagers sending things they don't want adults to see. As a general rule, this is something they will grow out of, and not something that will spill over. I have no use for snapchat, and I'm quite confident that I never will.
Now, obviously Snapchat has a lot of users and they are sending a lot of messages, but that doesn't mean it will grow into mainstream adult usage. Lucky for them, we keep making new teenagers every day.
I think the author doesn't know how to prove a hypothesis that's why the article is confusing.
He tries to prove that kids are not predictors of successful startups, but then he cites successful startups that were popular with adults. That's not how you make a prove, you can't make a prove of x causing y by showing that z causes y.
For this article to make sense, the author has to find out if the ratio of successful startups that were initially popular with kids is higher that the one of successful startups that were initially popular with adults.
Example: If 30% of startups that were initially popular with kids became successful and 42% of startups that were initially popular with adults became successful, then his hypothesis holds true. That's how you prove a hypothesis, but not at all the way the author did it.
I've been following fashion bloggers more closely as I believe they are a huge part of the success of services like Tumblr and Pinterest. I can remember when I first heard of Pinterest was because some blogs my girlfriend followed posted links to these new-fangled "photo pinboards" and a year later everyone was using it.
I'm not saying that fashion bloggers or kids for that matter are always right but perhaps there's something about the environment in college that makes services that are catered to these people much more likely to spread (the desire to fit in, to look cool with the next new thing, etc.). On the fashion front, tastemakers will be tastemakers, as much as the HN crowd may not be the target audience, fashion/style are important to a lot of folks.
What this means is that kids' tastes change and as they grow up, so will their tastes. Being popular with kids does not the next Facebook make. Instead, you are more likely to be ChatRoulette, MySpace, LiveJournal, etc.
Blogging is still quite popular, just in a different form and platform. Whatever you might have shared can now be shared as a FB post, Tweet, or Tumblr.
I love cranky old guy columns, especially when the author is self-aware enough to point it out. Very nicely done.
Having said that, the problem we have with startups is stated rather simply: startups do not succeed or fail based on somebody's ability to argue whether they make sense or not. That's why these beauty contests masquerading as business plan competitions or swimming with the sharks or whatever are such bullshit. It's not about whether you can make a reasoned argument one way or the other. It's about market traction. That's it.
Now everybody and their brother wants to play armchair epidemiologist. What are the "risk" factors associated with startups? Do the youth really play out? What should team sizes be? And so on. And no doubt some of these tidbits of data are actually showing promise.
But arguments like this always fall flat, which, incidentally, is one of the reasons that HN "rate my startup" comments need to be taken with a huge grain of salt. You don't reason your way to success. You test your way there.
Of course kids are good predictors. They have time and enthusiasm to discover something new that will allow them to communicate, alternative channel. When it becomes mainstream, they will leave, like they are leaving fb.
Does SnapChat is really worth 3bn or more, nobody knows for sure.
Am I alone in the conspiracy theory that SnapChat's founders are just pranking us for the heck of it? "We're 23, we can code just fine, the worst thing that can happen if this all goes south is that we get a job somewhere."
The article reads like a jealous 30-something founder/ceo/evangelist/whatever_is_trendy writing off snap-chat as a 'boy-band'. Facebook offering $3 Billion shows that snap-chat is indeed starting to eat facebook's lunch (future users)...you know facebook, the company geared toward teens, college kids, and in the last few years, older adults. So maybe the article is right, kids aren't indicators toward the future of tech (kindle, ipod, whatever), but they are indicators of the multi-billion dollar market that exists for them that Facebook current resides within. The author needs to throw out the "i know more than you" attitude and look at the market that snap-chat has either created (facebook not gearing toward teens) or is stealing.
This should especially ring with HN, as everything i've read here is about how if you have some crazy idea there's probably a market for it.
If having a huge exit is the goal of SnapChat, hopefully they will not regret the decision to turn down 3 billion. Longevity in social platforms is a bit of the exception, not the rule.
SnapChat is the tech equivalent of a boy-band. The very idea of sending something that only lasts a few seconds is snarky, and really only appeals to immature folk, ie. snarky kids. I'm okay with not being part of the kid crowd, or basing my evaluations on a volatile age group, after all, I've grown up and I'm much more _stable_ now.
The value I get out of it is the ability to be completely unfiltered. I carefully manage what I post to facebook, because a) it's going out to a lot of people and b) it's there forever.
I even felt slightly uneasy with G+'s Circles--even if I'm targeting my posts, I still feel pressure. I try to make my photos look nice, post statuses that people will actually like, and generally keep things "pristine."
Snapchat removes all this pressure, and because of that, I find it a joy to use.
That's wonderful. But the value you get out of it and the value an investor gets out of it are two very different matters. A price of $3 billion demands something like $120 million^ in profit, annually, in perpetuity... or more, if there's significant risk in the business plan like "we assume we will get that money in the future and are not making any of that money now".
(^ using a S&P500-ish 4% real discount rate here, to keep things simple)
Of course, I think the company is massively overvalued.
One thing I think they do have, however, is really strong engagement. Whenever I browse facebook or twitter, I'm very detached. I'm probably even working on something else. It's the same as when I occasionally watch TV -- half attention at best.
With Snapchat, I've got laser-focus. Whatever I'm looking at is going away in seconds and will never come back, so it's got a special urgency.
I'm sure it won't be easy to convert this into revenue, but I believe that engagement is special.
At the risk of stating the obvious, if you are sending pictures (or text) via snap chat that you do not want the world to see, then you are making a mistake.
It is trivially easy to capture screenshots from any screen, and the 'protection' that snapshot puts in place does absolutely nothing to stop this.
I would think twice before trusting that anything you post is not going to be widely available.
I'm not sending anything racy or inappropriate. They're just not photos I would want on my facebook, which is very much a "curated" representation of myself.
It's great for photos that are badly-lit, or inane, or make me look unattractive, or related to some sort of in-joke, or that only make sense in the moment. I wouldn't be mortified if any of them were released; they just don't make sense on my carefully-tended social media profiles.
The draw, at least for me, is not covertness or secrecy. It's a form of expression that doesn't demand the "does this really belong on my public profile?" test, which is really liberating.
That's a silly hand-wavy thing to say that doesn't reflect how Snapchat is actually used.
Although it's trivial to take a screenshot, the sender receives an alert telling them which friend took it. Given snapchat is used for sharing pictures with your close friends, that puts having your Snapchat made public in the same probability range as having your mobile phone hacked and pictures posted online. Sure, it happens, but that's a risk people are obviously willing to take.
Snapchat provides a mechanism for trusting your friends now without needing to trust them for infinity.
What is the difference between this and sending a SMS? If it isn't racy or something you need to hide, why is snapchat better than sending a text? Why does the "meh" picture need to disappear from the world and not just hide in your friends text messages at the back of the list?
I think in your argument you mistyped "or" instead of "and".
Its for stuff you want to hide, at least at little.
Its an issue of formality. FB is for advertising to future employers, your dinner manners need to be emily post level or you'll pay for it, or you're making a statement about manners and how little you respect employers who demand table manners. On the other hand, SC is the dinner manners equivalent of pizza with your buddies at the lan party, so eat with your hands, use shirt as napkin, its all good.
I'm not really sure I agree with the "snarky" sentiment, but I do agree in some sense that it is equivalent to a boy band. The end value (since the content is so momentary) is pretty fleeting, and (not a business export here, but) there doesn't really seem to be any way to monetize this sort of thing. In that sense, this app (and apps like it) can't really be any sort of long term.
how does this address any part of my rebuttle? You said you're not the demographic and don't understand why it's popular, thus the service is a 'boy-band' equivalent of the startup world.
Ehh, I feel like this is written from the perspective of the investment industry, who foolishly pumped money into the incredibly-overvalued Facebook IPO.
No dismissive hand-waving can account for the fact that Facebook has little room to grow, and next to no goodwill among younger users. Anecdotally, I can say that by far the largest users of facebook on my feed are 50-somethings posting the sort of libertarian pseudo-intellectual shit I used to get forwarded to me in emails by my grandparents.
Kids might not be reliable tech predictors but if they aren't adopting your product with no room to grow outside the Kid Demographic, then good luck to you.
Ehh, I feel like this is written from the perspective of the investment industry, who foolishly pumped money into the incredibly-overvalued Facebook IPO.
How was the Facebook IPO overvalued? The stock has increased 28.9% since the IPO.
It lost money at first, sharply, and at the moment the Price/Earnings is sitting at ~80. Google is about ~30 and arguably in a similar industry. That's a lot of money Facebook is not making for a service which is struggling with monetization.
Kids aren't reliable predictors because of a few fundamental lifestyle differences with adults: they don't spend much of their day working away from their friends, and their social network is usually within physically short range. For kids, everything in their lives happens within a short space of time within a small radius.
What works for kids may never work for adults, including the adults they will become, and vice versa.
So it's hard to tell whether the popularity of something amongst kids is a sign of a social change, or just a kids thing. (The latter not necessarily making it a fad, it could work for multiple generations of kids.)
Of course the even less reliable interpreters of such signs are old school dead tree journalists...