Andrew Watts has an excellent take on modern social media from a teen’s perspective:

Those are some reasons why many people my age tend to use Instagram more than they do Facebook. Everything about the application makes it less commercialized and more focused on the content, meaning more teens are inclined to visit it. When we do visit the application it is a much more pleasant experience so we are more inclined to Like and interact with the posts more. This increases our interaction with the application, meaning we will use it more, etc.

Facebook gets all of the photos we took — the good, the bad, etc—while Instagram just gets the one that really summed up the event we went to. It is much more selective, and honestly people spend more time on the captions to make them relevant/funny. On Facebook we just throw up everything we got so people can tag each other and show our family members that we’re still alive.

Do not dismiss this article, as Andrew makes some astute observations about how apps like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter are used. Most of my non-geek friends are slightly older than Andrew’s (they’re under 25), but I also see the same behaviors mentioned in the article. WhatsApp is obviously huge in Italy (as he notes), but everything from Facebook Groups to Instagram’s massive popularity and Twitter’s struggle to become huge is true for my circle of friends as well. Recommended read.