Just a brief pointer here. Check out the most recent episode of the Sun Identity Podcast, where-in Brandon and Don interview Don’s 20 year old daughter, Megan, on the different web-technologies she and her friends use.
You can’t make a mountain out of one date-point, but it’s good stuff to hear anyhow. Names:
- MySpace is for middle-schoolers, that is, people who are uncool to college students.
- Facebook rules.
- Email is for planning and scheduling.
- IM (here, AIM) is for communicating.
- Blogs and RSS are not a big deal.
- What’s Twitter?
Again, this is just one data-point, so don’t get your briches all screwed up. That said, it does make me start to think, as I Twittered the other day:
Is Web 2.0 the middle-agers web?
On a broader note, Brandon and Don do a good podcast on identity, football, and movies. If you’re into the identity management space (IdM), it’s worth subscribing to.
Disclaimer: Sun is a client.
Technorati Tags: facebook, im, myspace, podcasts, sunw, thekids
4 Comments
I like to call kids like this the Tech-Impaired.
People that *say* they know how to use computers, but are little more competent than your grandmother and don’t particularly care to get better because they’re not impatient enough to get things to work *for* them.
Weird, I tried to send a trackback, but it looks like it didn’t take. Perhaps my domain sounds too pr0n-ish? I posted my thoughts here:
http://blowmage.com/2007/10/20/social-networks-suck
Danno - these kids are not Tech-Impaired - they are Tech-Oblivious.
For them, computers are like cars - tools you use, you vaguely understand you have to maintain, useful things whose internal workings would be mysterious *if there was any reason at all to think about them*.
These kids are the realization of what those of us in the industry who, y’know, care about users have always said we wanted - they’re Normal People who can Use Computers. They don’t need to ‘get better’ at computers; their computers are finally good enough that they don’t have to be magicians to make them work.
This is a good thing; this is what the future of computers is; this is what we WANT if we want there to continue to be work in our field.
Calling them Tech-Impaired and sneering at them is the same as your mechanic sneering at you because you aren’t up to speed on OBD3 diagnostics, your plumber chuckling when he comes to unclog your toilet after your three-year-old flushes his 5th roll of toilet paper this afternoon.
“their computers are finally good enough that they don’t have to be magicians to make them work”
The illusion that this is the case is why spam and identity theft are so profitable: there are always more boxes to 0wn and use for sending spam, engaging in clickfraud, or whatever.
I am recently out of college and the claims above are consistent with what I’ve seen. I wouldn’t say blogs and RSS aren’t a big deal to kids; rather, young people, and most people for that matter, do not give a shit about “blogs” per se. They might read a popular website that happens to be in blog format (e.g., Perez Hilton, which gets millions of views a day and uses Wordpress), but the fact that it is running Wordpress means nothing to them.
They have no interest in self-congratulatory navelgazing meta-analysis of “the blogosphere,” in other words.
And they definitely don’t care about RSS, or even online reader apps that conceal the fact that they’re consuming feeds.
At least, that’s my experience.
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