• Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar
  • Skip to footer

NetFamilyNews.org

Kid tech intel for everybody

Show Search
Hide Search
  • Home
  • Youth
  • Parenting
  • Literacy
  • Safety
  • Policy
  • Research
  • About NetFamilyNews.org
    • Supporters
    • Anne Collier’s Bio
    • Copyright
    • Privacy

The universe in an app: Will youth create a trend within the trend?

April 21, 2015 By Anne Leave a Comment

The days of simple, single-use apps may be over. Or not, depending on the user, his or her context and a whole lot of other factors. But there is a bit of a trend among messaging apps. Not all apps – particularly the No. 1 messaging app, Facebook’s WhatsApp with 600+ million users – are part of it, though, so where you are in the world has been a driver of this trend so far.

(CC licensed)
(CC licensed)

The trend, according to the New York Times, is to offer messaging app users with just about everything but the kitchen sink: not just text, chat and photo-sharing, but shopping, games and so much more. The world’s No. 2 messaging app, WeChat by China-based Tencent, has a Yik Yak component (live chat for up to 500 people), a payment systems like Apple Pay or Snapchat’s Snapcash, hotel check-in with digital room key, appointment scheduling, prescription tracking, train ticket purchasing, Call a Chicken (for ordering food delivered to your house, presumably if you live in China) and more, the Times reports. Because Japan-based Line is built on, steeped in, providing and promoting pop culture, it’s a platform and offline world event organizer, not just an app, Fast Company’s description indicates. It’s hard to tell if the formula will work here in the West, but it does seem to be part of this trend everybody’s talking about. And Facebook Messenger seems to be moving in that direction, since CEO Mark Zuckerberg recently announced that Messenger is being opened up to app developers who want to “piggyback their own apps on top” of it, the Times reported, allowing Messenger to offer the rainbows of functions WeChat and Line offer. [See NetworkWorld.com for more about the announcement.]

Kids will probably customize the trend

Our multitasking kids may like the multi-functionality, but I have a theory: They won’t only be users or consumers of multi-functional apps, they’ll be customizers of them. It just may be a trend within a trend: young users developing their own piggybacking apps for the app platforms of their choice, kind of like game mods or Snapchat geofilters (or remember how, in the last decade, younger users loved “pimping” their MySpace profiles, as they called adding their own design elements and apps that enhanced their profile visitors’ experience?).

Besides, as our children have shown us, multitasking can happen among apps – and even devices – not just in apps. For example, one might use Snapchat mostly for super-spontaneous visual socializing, Instagram for visually marking a moment or 3 or 10 in a particular place, and Pinterest or Facebook for saving and sharing a whole album of vacation memories, etc., in a spectrum of apps for a spectrum of use cases just in the photo-sharing corner of social media (share your examples in Comments below!).

But back to the “trend”: That other Facebook messenger isn’t following suit – yet, anyway. WhatsApp “keeps it simple,” the Times reports. “The app is slowly rolling out voice calling features to Android users, but does little else besides chat, video and photo sharing, and audio messages,” it adds, editorializing that it’s “that simplicity and focus on messaging with no texting charges (or ads) [that] has made it the most popular messaging app in the world.”

So this trend – like most developments in user-driven media – depends on the users. We tend to vote with our deletes, downloads (of apps we don’t like and alternatives, respectively) diversifying uses. We’re a diverse population, and device and app use is as individual as the user. So I may be untrendy, but I lean this way: “Grafting on more features just because these apps have our attention could get annoying – especially if the features don’t work well or make the overall experience cluttered and confusing,” wrote the Times’s reporter Molly Wood. What do you think? And, even more importantly if we’re speaking as parents, what does each of your kids think? Because there could well be as many answers as there are kids.

Related links

  • More on how users vote with their feet – or diversifying social media practices, anyway: “Facebook privacy & the social media ‘collective unconscious’ (so far)”
  • A parent-aimed window on kids’ top social media picks in the UK
  • “Perfect digital parenting doesn’t exist”
  • “An app for teens that promotes (& gets) positivity”
  • “Students developing apps (and businesses) on the side”
  • When texting apps started seeming like a global juggernaut
Share Button

Filed Under: apps, kids, mobile, Parenting, Social Media, teens, texting, tweens, Youth Tagged With: Facebook Messenger, LINE, messaging, messengers, Snapchat, texting apps, WeChat, WhatsApp

Reader Interactions

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

Primary Sidebar

NFN in your in-box:

Anne Collier


Bio and my...
2016 TEDx Talk on
the heart of digital citizenship

Subscribe to my
RSS feed
Follow me on Twitter or even better:
NEW: Follow me on MASTODON!
Friend me on Facebook
See me on YouTube

IMPORTANT RESOURCES

Our (DIGITAL) PARENTING BASICS: Safety + Social
NAMLE, the National Association for Media Literacy Education
CASEL.org & the 5 core social-emotional competencies of SEL
Center for Democracy & Technology
Center for Innovative Public Health Research
Childnet International
Committee for Children
Congressional Internet Caucus Academy
ConnectSafely.org
Control Shift: a pivotal book for Internet safety
Crimes Against Children Research Center
Crisis Textline
Cyber Civil Rights Initiative's Revenge Porn Crisis Line
Cyberwise.org
danah boyd's blog and book about networked youth
Disconnected, Carrie James's book on digital ethics
FOSI.org's Good Digital Parenting
The research of Global Kids Online
The Good Project at Harvard's School of Education
If you watch nothing else: "Parenting in a Digital Age" TED Talk by Prof. Sonia Livingstone
The International Bullying Prevention Association
Let Grow Foundation
Making Caring Common
Raising Digital Natives, author Devorah Heitner's site
Renee Hobbs at the Media Education Lab
MediaSmarts.ca
The New Media Literacies
Report of the Aspen Task Force on Learning & the Internet and our guide to Creating Trusted Learning Environments
The Ruler Approach to social-emotional learning (Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence)
Sources of Strength
"Young & Online: Perspectives on life in a digital age" from young people in 26 countries (via UNICEF)
"Youth Safety on a Living Internet": 2010 report of the Online Safety & Technology Working Group (and my post about it)

Categories

Recent Posts

  • For SID 2023: What youth want ‘online safety’ to teach
  • ChatGPT for media literacy training
  • Future safety: Content moderators and digital grassroots justice
  • Mental health 2023, Part 1: Youth on algorithms
  • Where did my Twitter go? And other end-of-2022 notes
  • Global network of Net safety regulators: Let’s think on this
  • Dot-com bust, 2022-style
  • BeReal & being real about safety & privacy

Footer

Welcome to NetFamilyNews!

Founded as a nonprofit public service in 1999, NetFamilyNews quickly became the “community newspaper” of a vital interest community of subscribers in more than 50 countries. Site and newsletter became a blog in the early 2000s. Nowadays, you can subscribe in the box to the right to receive articles in your in-box as they're posted – or look for tweets, posts on our Facebook page, and key commentaries from Anne on her page at Medium.com. She welcomes your comments, follows and shares!

Categories

  • Home
  • Youth
  • Parenting
  • Literacy
  • Safety
  • Policy
  • Research

ABOUT

  • About NFN
  • Supporters
  • Anne Collier’s Bio
  • Copyright
  • Privacy

Search

Subscribe



THANKS TO NETFAMILYNEWS.ORG's SUPPORTER HOMESCHOOL CURRICULUM.
Copyright © 2023 ANNE COLLIER. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.