We used to think that mobile was an accelerator for everything that was out there. It made everything more accessible. Some people have even blamed the fall of older platforms, like Myspace, on the lack of mobile ubiquity (at least in part because we all know Myspace had its own issues). Everyone loved Facebook, but once it was available on mobile in a way that integrated with our lives, we loved it more. We are a mobile-centric community of Internet users. If there’s no app for a platform, we aren’t interested anymore. Who has logged onto Pinterest’s mobile website? Do they even have one? App or bust, right?

But aside from the behemoth networks — Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and sometimes Instagram, there are more and more offshoots that are not only giving us greater ability to do things we love, but they make us consider new ways to do them. We are constantly challenged to communicate with people in new and profound ways. Mobile is creating new categories of apps and, more importantly, communication. Snapchat is the prime example. Quick photos, disappearing forever. Facebook answered back, most recently, with Slingshot. Path has been trying to be the Facebook for close friends for years. Cyberdust offers temporary communication in text only. The list goes on.

“Anonymous first” was the big push last year. It wasn’t about who you knew. It was about what you had to say. Think of Whisper and Secret and Rumr and Truth and all the other apps that catered to our need to share our innermost thoughts, often with the people closest to us, but without ever telling them we were doing so. Some people announced guilty pleasures others publicly sorted out their sexual orientations and others confessed to moral/ethical transgressions. Secret let us do so directly to those we trusted. Or did we trust them? We didn’t tell them it was us. Secret made sure of it. Whisper let us do it to total strangers so there was no way to trace it back to us. With Truth and Rumr you had the ability to text people your deepest thoughts and not tell them from whom it came. Even Facefeed got in on the action with profile-less photos in a stream so it was the digital equivalent of walking down the street. Meet new people anonymously. See their face and say hello.

But that category has a hard time getting adoption because people have a hard time trusting privacy, thanks to Target, the NSA and a multitude of other breaches. Sure it’s private now but will it stay that way? That’s anyone’s guess. And if that database gets busted wide open, everyone’s personal secrets and thoughts come spilling out all over the digital landscape. But many people put their toes in the water. People have the urge to share. Sometimes they just aren’t ready for the transparency. They want to communicate, they want to tell their friends. That will have to mature more.

We’ve seen a recent flood in a new category — speed. The best part of an app is not having to open it at all. Wut’s that you say? The method here is the push notification itself. Why even open the app? Yo, do you Yo? All this does is send a notification that someone said “Yo” to you. You can click and Yo them back if you want. Bro, do you even Yo? Why go into the apps? To send a Yo or a Wut. Taptalk is another one that is slightly more robust. Robust, in this case, only as defined on a scale with Yo and Wut. Take a photo and send it to 1, 10 or 100 people. There’s no ongoing conversation. Tap to take, tap to send, close the app.

Once again we see a new category of app. And people flock to them. Yo has been called the dumbest app in existence by everyone with a blog and a smartphone, yet it’s currently #85 on the top free apps in the app store (and that’s where it’s fallen to). We are doing more and more on our phones as a whole so we want to do less and less individually. Apps need to get out of their own way, just like Apple said iOS7 would do for itself. Make simple — in, message, out.

These are two abilities that challenge the status quo of technological communication. Some will live, most will die, but we will forever change how we want to send our messages.