Have an Appy New Year!
Happy New Year – it’s 2020 and just when you learnt how to poke someone back, Facebook has become out of date. While we haven’t quite caught up to the Jetsons, it does seem that social media is the future. Tik Tok, Snap Chat and Kik all sound a bit like Gibberish but they don’t have to, take a look at the top apps that our kids are using.
TikTok (formerly called Musical.ly) is a social media platform that lets you create, share and discover 15 second videos. You can use music and effects to enhance your videos and you can also browse other people’s videos and interact with them. it has been marked as a fairly medium risk app by the NSPCC’s Netaware and users must be 13 years old and upwards to use the app.
Instagram the family favourite for picture perfect photos and enviable lifestyle shots. Users can post content on their profile grid or to their stories, which last 24 hours. You can follow your friends, family, celebrities and companies on Instagram. Instagram also has a live streaming feature.
Famed for their cutesy filters, Snapchat is a mobile messaging application used to share photos, videos, text, and drawings. It’s free to download the app and free to send messages using it. It has become hugely popular in a very short space of time, especially with young people. There is one feature that makes Snapchat different from other forms of texting and photo sharing: the messages disappear from the recipient’s phone after a few seconds.
WhatsApp lets users send text messages, audio messages, videos, and photos to one or many people with no message limits or fees. Their founder is driven on the idea on “no ads, no games and no gimmicks”
What parents need to know – It’s for users 13 and over and the end-to-end encryption ensures that only you and the person you’re communicating with can read what’s sent. Nobody in between, not even WhatsApp, can read the messages.
Kik is a free instant messaging app that lets you send text, photo and video messages to individuals or groups. You can also play games and talk to chatbots. There’s a Meet New People feature that lets you start a conversation with random users which the NSPCC have warned users to be cautious of.
Further information and resources can be found at NET AWARE.