Facebook’s purchase of WhatsApp draws attention by | Dhuru Patel
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athan Parker was walking through the streets of England while texting his friend, freshman Jwalanta Panthee in the United States. Panthee’s friend was studying abroad in England. Staying in contact with home would induce international costs, which could be pricey. So Parker turned to WhatsApp, an app that was recently purchased by Facebook, to text free of charge. “WhatsApp is really useful because I can stay in contact with others, and it is an easy way to get information to others without having to call them,” Panthee said. “I use WhatsApp instead of the messaging on Android.” WhatsApp is a free messenger for smartphones that allows for short message service messaging with the exclusion of texting charges.
Instead, the app uses 3G or Wi-Fi connection to send messages to any phone that has WhatsApp. “It’s really useful if you want to talk to family members or friends overseas, especially because there is no fee for international texting,” Panthee said. “This lets me talk as much as I want internationally without worrying about the cost.” One of WhatsApp’s differentiating characteristics is that the user can text anywhere in the world without a fee, unlike other messaging apps that only offer free texting in the United States and Canada. “WhatsApp will complement our existing chat and messaging services to provide new tools for our community,” Mark Zuckerberg, owner and CEO of Facebook, said to The Telegraph in a recent interview. Zuckerberg bought WhatsApp for $19 billion. The app had 465 million users, but it has grown to
more than 500 million users. But the app isn’t done growing — WhatsApp is still growing at a rate of a million users a day. It is predicted that the app will have one billion users by 2015. “Owning an iPhone for about two years costs about $2,000 in the U.S. About $500 of that is the phone and $1,500 is the data plan,” Zuckerberg said to CNBC. The price of owning a smartphone is quite high, not because of the phone, but because of the data plan. The phone is only a portion of the total cost, while the data plan amounts to a lot more. So using texting apps such as WhatsApp reduces the cost of smartphones by saving on texting and data charges. “I think the purchase of WhatsApp is going to be good for Facebook,” sophomore Katie Farina said. “Not a lot of people know about it now, but some of my friends overseas use it.”
Anonymous posts strike up conversation on YikYak by | Brandan Naef
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ounds of sobbing filled the school hallways as students and teachers frantically sought out shelter. After a bomb threat was “Yakked” about on the social media site Yik Yak, authorities advised everyone inside San Clemente High School, California to leave the school. No bomb was found. “A school resource officer discovered the threat while investigating a separate incident on Yik Yak,” Lt. Jeff Hallock, spokesman for the Orange County Sheriff’s Department said during an interview with the Los Angeles Times. “Authorities are attempting to identify the author of the bomb threat.” Yik Yak, a new social media application that allows anonymous posting, appeared on the market Feb. 20. In the case of San Clemente, students took advantage of the new apps anonymous ability. Freshman Ruben Scheyer is one of the 11 percent of the student body that uses the app at West. Roughly 89 percent of the student body said they had never heard of it on a recent Wingspan survey. “I use Yik Yak to look up funny quotes. You mostly find weird stuff on there,”
16 | features | wingspan | june 2014
Scheyer said. “I would say the purpose of the app is to entertain people in some sort of way.” Yik Yak uses location devices built into smartphones to determine a user’s location whenever someone “Yaks” on the application. This quality of Yik Yak causes uneasiness for some users. “This can be used to look into a dirty window,” media specialist Tom King said. “I would put it this way. I wouldn’t want my daughters to experiment with that app.” This new app has been causing problems in schools across the United States, anywhere from bomb threats to cyberbullying according to Los Angeles Times. “Now a lot of stuff happens off campus, ”Assistant Principal Shannon Auten said. “But when it comes onto campus and it becomes a disruption that’s when we deal with it.” Though cyberbullying at West does happen on social media, Yik Yak has not caused any issues so far. Cyberbullying has become the main issue with this new application. “We obviously can’t monitor everything that goes on your phones or anything like that,” Auten said. “But when something is brought down to us, and it is an issue of bullying, we take it seriously.”
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