Teens, Smartphones & Texting | Pew Research Center's Internet & American Life Project

Teens, Smartphones & Texting | Pew Research Center's Internet & American Life Project

Teens are fervent communicators. Straddling childhood and adulthood, they communicate frequently with a variety of important people in their lives: friends and peers, parents, teachers, coaches, bosses, and a myriad of other adults and institutions. This report examines the tools teens use to communicate, with a particular focus on mobile devices, and then places the use of those tools in the broader context of how teens choose to communicate with people in their lives.

The volume of texting among teens has risen from 50 texts a day in 2009 to 60 texts for the median teen text user. In addition, smartphones are gaining teenage users. Some 23% of all those ages 12-17 say they have a smartphone and ownership is highest among older teens: 31% of those ages 14-17 have a smartphone, compared with just 8% of youth ages 12-13.

Game Makers Give Away ‘Freemium’ Products - NYTimes.com

Game Makers Give Away ‘Freemium’ Products - NYTimes.com:

Still paying 99 cents to download a smartphone game? That’s far too much. More developers are now giving their games away — and then charging for extra features.

The strategy is known as freemium, as in free meets premium. 


And it is being adopted even by giant game makers like Electronic Arts that might once have sneered at the idea because free games had the reputation of being low quality or full of annoying ads.

Germany Trying to Cut Publishers In on Web Profits - NYTimes.com

Germany Trying to Cut Publishers In on Web Profits - NYTimes.com:

Under the proposal, Internet aggregators and search engines would have to pay the publishers if they wanted to display all or parts of their articles — even small snippets like those that are shown in search links.

Pinterest Aims at the Collector Hidden Inside All of Us - NYTimes.com

Pinterest Aims at the Collector Hidden Inside All of Us - NYTimes.com:

Pinterest, the most talked about start-up of the spring, did not take that approach. Instead, the company went after a different crowd when it introduced its service in 2009. The site lets users create “boards” where they can collect images from around the Web and share them with friends and strangers.

Social networking sites and politics | Pew Research Center's Internet & American Life Project

Social networking sites and politics | Pew Research Center's Internet & American Life Project:

Friends disagree with friends about political issues and usually let their disagreements pass without comment. Among the SNS users whose friends post political content, 25% always agree or mostly agree with their friends’ political postings; 73% of these SNS users “only sometimes” agree or never agree with their friends’ political postings. When they disagree with others’ posts, 66% of these SNS users say they usually ignore the posts; 28% said they usually respond with comments or posts of their own; and 5% said it depends on the circumstances.

Hacker, Informant and Party Boy of the Projects - NYTimes.com

Hacker, Informant and Party Boy of the Projects - NYTimes.com:

On the Internet he was Sabu, a notorious celebrity who led a scattered tribe of politically motivated “hacktivists,” revered as the sly mastermind of brash computer attacks. Then, when he was caught, he slipped into the role of federal informant.

But always he was Hector Xavier Monsegur, party boy of the projects.

The multiple worlds of Sabu converged on Tuesday when court papers revealed his real identity.

As an informant, he helped bring down a batch of prominent fellow hackers in Europe and the United States. They were indicted on a charge of computer crimes that the authorities said affected one million victims, along with major companies and government agencies.

New Apps Connect to Friends Nearby - NYTimes.com

New Apps Connect to Friends Nearby - NYTimes.com: to find friends, and friends of friends, whenever they were nearby? Is that unnerving? Or is it terribly beneficial?

Many companies say it is beneficial and that their apps will help people forge new connections and meet someone they perhaps should know. App stores have been flooded with such tools in recent weeks. Kismet, Glancee, Highlight, Ban.jo, Meeteor, Pearescope, GetGauss, Intro, Qrious, Mingle and Sonar, hope to transform the smartphone into a social dowsing rod that delivers an alert when it detects other people nearby who share interests, friends or career goals.