I am delighted to announce the release of our new parents’ guides to two of the most popular social apps among teens, Instagram and Snapchat. You can read or download and print the free guides at ConnectSafely.org. Just 6 pages – including the “Top 5 Questions” parents have about each app right up front – [...]
Instagram is nothing if not creative – the app itself and its users. When I’m in it watching how the kids who encouraged me to follow them use it, I can’t help but smile. They are creative in/with all parts of the experience – the photos, the filters for messing around with photography, the emoticons, [...]
Also filed in cell phones, cellphones, Digital Tech, kid tech, Kids, Mobile, smart phones, Social Media, Youth
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Tagged "Photos of You", apps, cellphones, Facebook, Instagram, Trudy Ludwig
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You may’ve noticed this too: Online and on-phone conversations have gotten very mixed-media – very artful, in a sense. Have you noticed that our children are among the most creative mixed-media conversationalists now? It’s delightful to see the fun they have with this. Take stickers, for example. Because they’re now part of Version 3 of [...]
Also filed in cellphones, Digital Tech, Mobile, mobile socializing, Social Media
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Tagged apps, cellphones, emoji, emoticons, Instagram, mobile technology, Path, Social Media, stickers, Teens, Youth
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Path, the mixed-media app for more intimate phone-based social networking, really illustrates how very borderless but cultural social media is. Growing by about 1 million users a month and now one of the Top 20 apps for Android phones, according to the Wall Street Journal, this app that limits your social network to 150 friends [...]
Users of the popular, fairly new Snapchat app tend to like it because a photo vanishes within 10 seconds or less of being viewed by its recipient. That adds something fun, spontaneous and just “real” to photo-sharing that’s pretty unprecedented in social media. New parents’ guide Here’s why: Typically in social networking, “users tend to [...]
Also filed in applications, cellphones, Digital Tech, Mobile, Parenting, photo-sharing, tech parenting
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Tagged apps, cellphones, hacks, Kids, mobile phones, mods, Parenting, parents, photo-sharing, Snapchat, workarounds
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Although as of this writing, a search of Google News turned up nearly 2,000 news stories about it, the new uber app for Android phones that Facebook unveiled today isn’t really big news for families. I know I just wrote about the teen mobile trend, but I sincerely doubt teens will want their use of [...]
Interesting: On the one hand, I hear a Nickelodeon executive saying kids are hard-pressed to spend $10 in the Apple App Store, and on the other I read that Apple reached a settlement with an untold number of “parents who sued the company for making it too easy for kids to rack up charges by [...]
Also filed in Digital Tech, Mobile, mobile games, Parenting
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Tagged App Store, Apple, apps, cellphones, games, iPad, iPod Touch, Parenting, parents
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In case parents are interested in what the toy and digital industries are thinking about and designing for kids… Digital play that’s both mobile and tactile was the centerpiece of what all the adults were talking about at the Digital Kids conference in New York last week, but their insights were like “frozen concentrate” compared [...]
Also filed in Digital Tech, Gaming, smart phones
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Tagged apps, digital devices, digital kids conference, digital toys, disney, games, Kids, mobile apps, Nickelodeon, phones, Sony, tablets, video games, Virtual Worlds
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The company behind Rounds – a video hangout app for mobile and Web – has decided to keep the socializing just among friends. Referring to its “young user base” (it says 70% of its users are under 25, though it has yet to catch on at my son’s high school), this week announced that the [...]
Also filed in Digital Tech, online video, Risk, Risk & Safety, Safety, Video
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Tagged apps, cellphones, mobile phones, mobile technology, Rounds, twitter, video sharing, Vine
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Snapchat, the little app that came out of nowhere – well, Stanford University, but launched with no media fanfare by a couple of students whose service now supports 50 million snaps a day – has been joined by a similar “ephemeral messaging” app by Facebook: Poke. But now that perishable photo-sharing (the photos disappear in [...]
Also filed in Digital Tech, Mobile, mobile communications, mobile data, mobile socializing, mobile technology, photo-sharing
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Tagged apps, cellphones, ephemeral messaging, Facebook, mobile technology, photo-sharing, Poke, Snapchat
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