These days people are looking to
connect with others through many different platforms from FaceBook, LinkedIn,
etc. It has even gotten to the point that phone game apps give the user the
opportunity to communicate with other players. With so many platforms to
communicate on it is no wonder why face-to-face communication is declining
among our generation.
Ladies and gentleman I give you
the greatest phone app a college student has student has ever come across: Yik
Yak!
This app has been around for a little over a year and it has
taken college campuses by storm. With
this app users are able to post anonymously and can say whatever they desire as
long as it is within the 200 character limit. One of the great features of this
Platform is the creators made it so that only other users within a 1.5 mile
radius can send other post and comments that show up on your feed. One of the
problems that arises with a platform like this is it opens up the realm of
cyber bullying, which is becoming more prevalent in today’s society. Although
many of the posts happen to jokes and one-liners, there have been posts made of
confessions made of heinous crimes.
Up next we have the Platform that pretty went extinct the
moment FaceBook got big. Let’s be honest though, this was pretty much the
original Face Book. I give you MySpace. At the peak of its existence MySpace
was considered a “Titan” of social media. With a title like that it can a
person wonder what had to go wrong for such a strong Platform to almost become
non-existent? According to the Bloomberg Business Week Magazine a compilation
of mismanagement, a merger gone wrong and countless strategic blunders sent MySpace
to its grave. Like many other Social Media Platforms MySpace made its money
from advertisements. The issue with this was users started to become annoyed
with the increased use of ads on their homepage. Now starting to make a small
comeback MySpace is becoming a Platform to use if a person wants to create an
identity in the music industry.
I think few of the items which makes MySpace and YikYak such
different platforms are the way content is presented. On YikYak there is a
target audience of college students. So much so that they created what is
called a “geofence.” This geofence is a barrier which disallows users on High
School campuses from using the app. Also the fact that it’s anonymous makes it
more of a “free-for-all” type platform. I like to think of MySpace as the unprofessional
LinkedIn page. Its main purpose is to connect people and socialize.
I had never heard of Yik Yak before. You did a great job of letting your voice come through your writing. It was easy to see your personality come out. Nice work!
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