Category: Apps

The definition of Facebook creeping

Posted on by Emilie Buckman

I feel like a creep. Social media and technology made me and everyone else into creeps.

With a constant stream of accessible information, I know too much about people and their private life. It’s not necessarily that I am seeking this information out. Rather it’s a constant presence and that is too prevalent to ignore. I certainly don’t want to know the girl I had in English class freshmen year is married with a kid and currently trying to potty train said kid.

What’s tech/social media savvy girl to do! Defriend people? I don’t think so. (It should be noted I fear I will run into those people I’ve deleted and that awkward hypothetical isn’t worth defriending.) To be a part of this generation you kind of have to participate in common modes of communication:  texts, tweets, status, direct messages, etc. And you are going to be an inadvertent creep.

But there is a new creep feature to all of this mess I refuse to accept. It started this summer with Facebook messages and has moved to the iPhone. (If it’s on iPhone it won’t be long before it’s on Android.) That feature is “Seen” notification. It tells you the exact time someone reads your message or text.

Well that couldn’t possibly lead to crazy or obsessive behavior, could it? “Oh, I see read y text at 8:37 a.m. and now it is 4:13 p.m. Why haven’t you responded?” This feature will move you quickly past creep and right into crazy. I just don’t see any good from it. It just too bad none of this developers realize there is such a thing as too much information.

A different filter for Instagram

Posted on by Emilie Buckman

I always have to preface these types of posts with this statement:  my feelings towards social media and technology vary greatly when talking about personal versus business use.

It’s fair to say I can be rather dismissive when it comes to the latest and greatest technology, gadgets, and all around high tech offerings.   Not because of some arbitrary feelings of nostalgia, but rather, it’s my need to avoid pointless fads.  (I can say with pride I escaped the pitfall of MySpace.)

A few months ago I wrote a fairly pretentious and completely judgmental post about the phone app and social media site Instagram.   Now I rejected joining long enough but, being that I work in social media, I wasn’t able to avoid it for too long.  So I broke down and started my new life with Instagram.  But if you are expecting this post to be a complete retraction to my less than enthusiastic evaluation, you will be sorely disappointed.

I will say, now I see the filters are amusing and how truly creative people can use the medium in ways that will impress even the most cynical of photography snobs. With all my reservations, I finally get that it is just plain and simple fun, even if you use the app to document your entire caloric and caffeine intake for the day. (It’s still annoying but I guess I can forgive it.)

What I won’t concede about is the necessity of a site in and of its self.  Using it on your phone is one thing but to trying to connect on a computer is useless.  You have to use an outside site, like Webstagram, which I don’t get.  And the best mediums to showcase your pictures are still Facebook and Twitter.  So I still have a separate site is pointless.

So at the end of the day my views might have softened towards Instagram but I am definitely not a convert.  But let’s be real for a second; I’m just salty no one wants to follow me and all the pictures I post of beers at the terrace.

Review of StockTouch app

Posted on by Brian Lee

The folks at Visible Market invited me to try their new app called StockTouch, available for $4.99 in the Apple App Store. Its unique premise is that it “brings the power of data visualization and financial information together.”

I myself use E-Trade not only to buy, but for research. E-Trade gets the job done for the latter point, but StockTouch takes it to the next level.

From its graphic interface, you can see how the top 100 US and Global companies are doing in nine sectors (e.g. health, tech, etc.) over any given period of time (e.g. one day to five years).

I tested the app on an iPod Touch. I venture to guess that the interface would be better had I used an iPad, which I don’t own. For example, the main screen shows all nine sectors. After you tap on one of the sectors, that sector itself takes up the whole screen, but to show all of the companies at once (represented by little rectangles), each one is very small. If you have larger fingers or don’t have a stylus, you may find it hard to choose the company you want.

Still, the display is what makes StockTouch a keeper. I can’t think of a better way to quickly see how a stock is doing in the market. The color-coded system (green=gains, red=losses) shows you how a stock is doing based on its price, volume, against the S&P 500 or against its peers.

As weird as this sounds, I actually felt smarter using the app. It’s wonderful to be able to interpolate and even extrapolate trends in a stock’s performance. Plus, you can get all the latest news about the stock.

One other thing: you can also mark stocks as favorites, so that they are highlighted in each sector. In a future update, I’m hoping that you can just view all your favorites together at once.

Here’s a video from the StockTouch website: