Assignment 18: News App Critique

As a college student, I am perched on information/entertainment hosts constantly looking for the latest event on campus. The fastest way for me to know about things that are going on is through a combination of Outlook and Snapchat.

Southern Arkansas University is not the greatest with its communication, but if you need information, your student email is the place to be. Our student emails are run through a software called Outlook that is compatible with most devices aside from being easy accessible online. On both the desktop and the mobile version, Outlook opens directly to your inbox as any other email carrier would, but you are directed to your focused mail group first. It has the convenient features of "Focused" and "Other" to help separate your incoming mail from things you would like to know about right now and things you would like to know but do not necessarily need to know.

THINGS YOU WOULD LIKE TO KNOW WOULD INCLUDE:

• Emails from your professors (Conversations, class cancelling, deadlines)
• Emails from organizations you participate in
• Emails about your financial status or FAFSA
• Emails from your advisor

THINGS YOU WOULD LIKE TO KNOW BUT DO NOT NECESSARILY NEED TO KNOW:

• Lost and Found Emails
• Emails from other organizations and their events
• Emails from professors of classes you do not take
• Emails about volunteering

These are just examples of how you can filter your inbox. You may tailor it to the way you need in your settings. 

Snapchat is almost a follow-up app to my college experience. As most people expect, Snapchat is a very personal and intimate app where you can visually inform your friends/viewers of anything that may happen around you. You have the options of taking photographs to which you can add a timer up to 10 seconds for viewing or set it to infinite so that it will not go away until the viewer pleases. You can also take videos up to 10 seconds long or even consecutively up to a minute. You can allow the viewer to see the video once or to loop the video where they can watch it over and over until the viewer stops it. Snapchat has color filters, interactive filters, and geofilters that can be used to either enhance the content or give more information about the your surroundings. Viewers have the option to click on you "Story" where any "snaps" you have uploaded will reside. Each snap has a 24 hour timer from the time it is uploaded, and after that timer is up the video is gone and can no longer be seen or accessed by you or the viewer.

I use Snapchat typically to see anything that I cannot get in Outlook like where parties and events are, when they will happen, and how they are going. I have a busy schedule, so if there are very few or no snaps of the events then I tend not to waste my time on them. Also, you can see if a party is "lit" enough to spend your money. If I have not seen a flyer around campus, I can go straight to Snapchat to see if anyone has posted about it. I can also watch a story and contact that person directly for more information about their snap. If you pinch the home screen, you can pull up the Snapchat Map that will tell you exactly where people are if they have the information available. Also on the map you may see glowing color splotches that are interactive. If clicked on, you can view any snap that was taken in that area. And, just like any social media platform, there is a section for news/ information that is trending or extremely popular at the time. SAU has its own story that can be seen and added to as well as other colleges, events, national days, celebrities, etc.

I find both apps to be very well executed and straight forward about what they are used for. Outlook is more of a professional app while that can only reach so many at a time, but Snapchat is very open and available to everyone yet personal and  intimate to the user and the information given. In Outlook I love the "Focused" and "Other" feature as well as having the option to add other email accounts from other hosts so that I only have to download one app. Outlook is, however, very exclusive. Even though I can get campus news from here, it does not supply everything I need as a student. In Snapchat, I like how it is easy to document my life and my area so freely and under my own discretion. I also like how other people's lives are at my fingertips and how easy it is to get quick information about what is going on around me. But, Snapchat is way too personal to the user for it to be a source a news. There may be 1 piece of information I need between tens of snaps that I have to tap through. I also feel as though the Snapchat Map feature, as nice as it may be, is very dangerous. If you do not hide your location, you can be found very easily. It can even tell you if someone is driving or listening to music.