Today's Ypulse guest post is from our friend Allison Mooney, Director of Trends & Insights at MobileBehavior and editor of the agency’s trend site, Next Great Thing, the insights arm of Fleishman-Hillard's Youth and Mobile Marketing Group. Coming off of SXSW Interactive last month, I thought Allison could offer Ypulse readers a glimpse into what's next for Gen Y in the mobile space.

For more insights, catch Allison at the Ypulse Youth Marketing Mashup where she'll be moderating our mobile marketing panel.

If you work in youth media or marketing and have an idea for a Ypulse Guest Post, feel free to email me.

Gen Y, Reborn Digitals And Virtual Borderlands

We all share information to create and craft our identities. But what we share—and where—is becoming increasingly complex online and on mobile.

As discussed at a SXSW panel on mobile social networking, each site has its own "social graph," its own audience. Each might demand a certain tone or mode of interaction. Young people are learning to manage these multiple graphs, deftly switching modes as the community requires.

But as the social web explodes, this is becoming increasingly difficult. So sites are building in cross-posting features and privacy controls (i.e. link Facebook status with Twitter, cross-post Flickr photos to Tumblr). While they are getting better, such interoperability attempts have been pretty weak thus far. The privacy controls on Facebook alone still require Magellan-like skills to navigate.

This is especially important for Gen Y now that Boomers are Facebooking, Flickring and tweeting. These "reborn digitals," as they're being called, are complicating matter for kids. What happens when Dad sees those frat party pictures? Or a teacher reads a screed about their class? As discussed on Anastasia's "What Teens Want in a Website" panel, this can work in reverse as well, i.e. "Do I really want to know that much about mom and her friends?"

New location-based services will certainly make this even more of an issue. On the "Location, Location, Location" panel at SXSW, Sam Altman from Loopt recounted his apprehension a couple days prior, when his mom signed up for the location-sharing service. Google's Latitude will continue to make location a more "mainstream" data point. While Loopt, for one, is building in levels of inform sharing to address this, will young people use these privacy controls? None of the teens on Anastasia's panel said they kept their profiles private.

The truth is, privacy will always win until outweighed by value, including the value of self-expression and identity formation, especially for young people. As Altman pointed out, usage of Loopt's "oversharing" features, such as GeoGraffiti, skews much younger (teens and early 20s) and tends to scare older users. For younger users, convenience will continue to take a backseat to control.

As young people continue to learn how to govern themselves on social networks, location will be just another layer to manage. Hopefully Loopt and other mobile social networks make this simple to do.

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More about Allison

Allison Mooney is the Director of Trends & Insights at MobileBehavior and editor of the agency’s trend site, Next Great Thing, the insights arm of Fleishman-Hillard's Youth and Mobile Marketing Group, the youth mobile marketing division of Fleishman-Hillard. There, she tracks mobile trends and innovations with an emphasis on teens. In addition to regularly contributing to NGT's blog, Allison has also written for publications like PSFK, Radar, and Glamour.

For more coverage of the latest trends and developments in mobile technology for youth, check out the Ypulse Mobile Channel.

Categorized under: Mobile

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