Swap a face or two Facebook has spotted an opportunity again. It's buying Masquerade, the company that made the app that's No 1 on the App Store right now. It's also available on Android. While I don't recommend it from a business user point of view, it's an interesting example of what the young are almost guaranteed to love. Masquerade or MSQRD as the app is called, opens up with a frame in which you position your face. Instantly, one of the filters selected from a line-up below will swap your face with its own. This could be Leonardo DiCaprio or an awful monkey or a number of other ridiculous faces. Whatever expression you don will be mirrored by the swapped face and you can take a video with sound or a still photo to spook others with. Well, it's fun for the overly serious too.
Tweet an xcerpt sometimes you want to post a piece of content on Twitter but specifically point out something in an article. XCerpt is a great app for doing just that. It's available for free on Android. When you select a piece of content to share, you can take a screenshot of it. XCerpt picks it up from the photo gallery and lets you highlight text and choose colours for both the highlight and the frame. You connected to Twitter and there will be space for you to add a comment. And just post. It not only looks nice, it's a good way to start discussions and ensure people read your share.
The app asks for a source, so you have to be sure you copy the URL.This is a bit cumbersome and confusing, but still, for some instances when you need to point out a sentence or a quote, XCerpt is useful.
A dose of viral shots another app youngsters will take to is ViralShots, on Android. This is a curation and aggregation of a whole lot of viral content from different sources including images that appear on WhatsApp chats, social news, Facebook images, trending stories etc. The focus is on trying to collect content that is amusing — weird, trending and fun, as the app's own description says. It includes items from Dubsmash videos, wildly popular with young people. There's also a huge list of news sources from which content is drawn. ViralShots content is also available in more than one language. Apart from English, there's Hindi, Bengali and Telegu. I would be careful to de-select push notifications if I were you as you don't want to get interrupted for the latest breaking funny story.
BW Reporters
Mala Bhargava has been writing on technology well before the advent of internet in Indians and before CDs made their way into computers. Mala writes on technology, social media, startups and fitness. A trained psychologist, she claims that her understanding of psychology helps her understand the human side of technology.
