Fashion Addicts Rejoice! Michelle Obama App

New Twitter App ‘Retwacts’ Your Tweets

On a really bad day, a quick, inaccurate tweet can spiral a news story out of control, as seen prominently during the coverage of the recent bombings in Boston. As of now, Twitter doesn’t have its own fix. 

As the Atlantic’s Brian Fung reported earlier this month, software developer Stonly Baptiste – whose daytime job is with the Pennsylvania-based company independenceIT – has developed a plug-in app that could solve the problem. He named it Retweet Retwact or Retwact (see what he did there?).

Soldier ‘Before and After’ Portraits Go Viral

We Are Not the Dead documents the effects of war in a virtual photo gallery. The images portray 15 British soldiers before, during and after serving in Afghanistan and are captioned with their thoughts from each time period. Between yearnings for the feel of carpet underfoot and expressions of repatriated culture shock (pink hair!) it chronicles the limitless human capacity to normalize anything, even IEDs. It is just how we cope.

“It was a nightmare trying to extract [a wounded soldier] and get the chopper in while we were in water up to your chin, it was horrible,” says Private Ben Frater, 21. “And now we are home? It’s strange. Quiet. I find that I’m getting bored easily after 10 minutes. I feel anxious all the time that I should be doing something.”

Is Facebook Lamebook for Teens?

Kids these days. New research out of the Pew Internet & American Life Project this week tells us that while young people, ages 12 to 17, share more personal information on Facebook, they’re also not as into it.

A reported 91 percent of teenagers posted pictures on Facebook in 2012, versus 79 percent back in 2006. Along similar lines, 71 percent use their school name on their profile, up from 49 percent. Even information that’s more personal, like one’s email address or phone number, are being shared by a higher percentage of teens. In 2006, only 29 percent of Facebook users posted their email addresses. In 2012, that rose to 53 percent. In 2006, 2 percent of users revealed their phone numbers. Now, it’s up to 20 percent.

At the same time, researchers turned to focus groups to find out how teenagers feel about the site–and how they feel is not as enthused.

Flip the News: A Real Gender-Bender

How’s this for a thought experiment. Say Yahoo CEO Melissa Mayer was a guy and Tumblr’s boss David Karp was a woman–would stories about Yahoo buying Tumblr for $1.1 billion earlier this week have read the same?

That’s, in part, what the new Tumblr blog Flip the News is trying to ponder, post by post, flipping an article subject’s gender or race.

The blog’s author most recently flipped a New York Times profile about Karp, who dropped out of high school to become home-schooled at his mother’s suggestion and is now part of “a tiny circle of 20-something entrepreneurs, hoodie-wearing characters like Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and Foursquare’s Dennis Crowley, who have struck it rich before turning 30,” according to Jenna Wortham at the Times.