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Snapchat is a new way to share moments with friends. Snap an ugly selfie or a video, add a caption, and send it to a friend (or maybe a few). They'll receive it, laugh, and then the snap disappears. The image might be a little grainy, and you may not look your best, but that's the point. It's about the moment, a connection between friends, and not just a pretty picture.

"What sex education used to be, it's now the `technology talk' we have to have with our kids," said Rebecca Levey, a mother of 10-year-old twin daughters who runs a tween video review site called KidzVuz.com and blogs about technology and educations issues.

"Youth move between sites quickly. For example, Instagram is a current favorite among youth. Instagram is a photo-sharing site where users can post photos, "like" other people's photos and share them. Snapchat is also popular. This is a mobile service where users can take a photo, send it to someone else, and schedule it to delete within a few seconds. What is important to remember is that both are just services, and they share the same properties as many of their popular predecessors (such as MySpace, Facebook, and Chatroulette). There will always be new services that children move in and out of fluidly. Given the choice between trying to block children from a site and teaching them how to use it maturely, my hope is that parents do the latter. Especially as children are joining new services at increasingly young ages, how they use it becomes as important as what they use."

"If you think about it for a second, the fact that young people aren't especially reliable predictors of tech trends shouldn't come as a surprise. Sure, youth is associated with cultural flexibility, a willingness to try new things that isn't necessarily present in older folk. But there are other, less salutary hallmarks of youth, including capriciousness, immaturity, and a deference to peer pressure even at the cost of common sense. This is why high school is such fertile ground for fads. And it's why, in other cultural areas, we don't put much stock in teens' choices. No one who's older than 18, for instance, believes One Direction is the future of music."