Teens

Wow, Andrew’s additional thoughts around an article on how teens use MySpace in lieu of email reminded me of my last post about RSS usage.

People are goal-oriented. When people face an application (or any object), these things immediate take a personal context. What is this for? What can I do with this? Providing clear and unobstructed uses that fulfill goals is what makes something “intuitive.” The more thought required to how it works or how to apply it in daily life is what makes it “hard to use.”

When we pit MySpace vs. email, the governing user goal is “I want to follow what my friends are up to.” So why turn down email and choose a social network instead?

• Email addresses are technical and hard to remember. Social networks are visual and based on directories — nothing to remember and easy ways to find things when you need to.
• Email is a protocol and sometimes requires local clients to communicate with a server. Social networks are accessible whereever there is a browser.
• Email is open and can be intercepted and spammed. Social networks are based on permissions and you must be somehow related to a sender to see his/her message.
• Email is stateless, and only represents the message at hand. Social networks offer gobs of data about the user’s activites that don’t have to be awkwardly crammed into an single message to share.
• Email has annoying limitations such as file sizes and attachments. Social networks are designed to help share audio, video and other rich content in one place.
• Email requires you to remember your relationships and include everyone that is necessary for a message in the To: line. Social networks manage relationships for you, and messages can be freely broadcasted.
• Email is a catch-all by nature and puts everything in one spot. Social networks allow people to view particular facets of their communications — by following individual users or groups.

I’m just scratching the surface here.

Coming back to the RSS comparison: The problem with RSS is that it is a more a format than it is a model of communication. Talking about “providing RSS” is just as obtuse as talking about “providing HTML” — it doesn’t really mean anything to the average person. People talk about end uses. “Read about”, “learn about”, etc..

But email isn’t a robust system for those things either, and for average users it isn’t that far off from RSS, as every little email that drops in somehow serves a different end — the latest newspaper headlines, a banking alert, a reminder from your spouse. It is a means to get a message from one point to the next… however, it provides only a message and very little context.

Technically, even a simple task like “share this photo with Joe” isn’t easy. Not until you become an expert, entrenched in the subtleties of image filetypes, attachments and HTML composition. That is, unless you use a “send to a friend” link on a photo site to do all that crap for you. But then… what if that person regularly visited the same photo site? Why bother with email at all?

So what’s the goal of email? I suppose it is “I want to see if I have any email.” Not that attractive, is it? That doesn’t mean email goes away for good, but it does mean it’s weak enough to be overtaken by something more specific to a user’s needs.

And when you’re a teen, and your only need is to stay in contact with your friends… well, you get the picture. Social networks and IM rule.