Noted: Snapchat Without the Chat

Photos are shot and sent with the assurance that they will disappear automatically a few seconds after they’re viewed. No lingering blackmail material from bachelor parties or cellulite-exposing swimsuits.

In fact, since the images are fleeting, users are liberated to share the least flattering or most embarrassing “selfies”: lots of intentionally crossed eyes and double chins, lots of sitting on the toilet seat or throwing up on the Ferris wheel.

Until recently, Snapchat’s Guide for Parents prohibited children younger than 13 from using the app and required parental consent for anyone 13 to 17. But last week, the company introduced a PG version called SnapKidz that allows saving and captioning snapshots but not sending or receiving them. Of course, nobody is asked to produce a driver’s license, and in practice an overwhelming number of the 100 million photos shared every day are from teenagers and tweens — those too young to remember the provenance of the self-destructing reel-to-reel tape in “Mission: Impossible.”

“My brother, who’s 12, uses it with all his friends,” said Katya Stambler, a 15-year-old in Los Angeles, referring to traditional Snapchat. “They kind of doll themselves up for it, put on makeup. Older kids are less self-conscious. My friends and I take ugly pictures. You want to make the other person laugh, if only for three seconds.”

Proclamations from the creative team at Snapchat sound lofty and lyrical. The Web site states, “The allure of fleeting messages reminds us about the beauty of friendship — we don’t need a reason to stay in touch.”

Reality is somewhat different. “A lot of teens use it for sexting,” Katya said. “Parents are kind of against it. But as I explained to my mom, it’s like driving a car: you can either be safe or be reckless.”

Snapchat’s built-in disappearing act would seem to allay concern about images living in perpetuity on the Web, resurfacing just in time for law school applications or job interviews.

And yet. ... Anyone who’s quick, and determined to outwit the system, can take a screenshot of a photo before it evaporates. (Snapchat has always promised to send a notification when it detects an “illegal” screenshot, but the newest version of Apple’s iOS disables this function.) And a technically savvy Snapchatter (sound like any middle-schooler you know?) can overcome the limitations of the operating system on a mobile device, a feat known as “jailbreaking” on an iPhone or “rooting” on an Android.

“People who are pretty dumb can do it,” said Matthew Vincent, a 13-year-old in Austin, Tex., “and I’d say 90 percent of my class is using this app.”

“We don’t ever say that we’re a secure way to send ugly photos,” said Evan Spiegel, one of Snapchat’s founders. “We allow the Snapchat community to enforce its own norms. If you want to play a mean joke, we can’t stop you. But it’s important to look at how people build and maintain friendships. They would gain nothing in friendship by saving an ugly photo and posting it.”

Mr. Spiegel and Bobby Murphy conceived the application as students at Stanford. (There is a pending lawsuit from a former classmate who claims it was his idea, similar to the legal battle over Facebook; the blogerati have dubbed him Snapchat’s Winklevoss.) “It felt awful to be on social networks presenting myself as this awesome guy: ‘Here I am at the coolest party or on a great vacation,’ ” said Mr. Spiegel, now 22, “when a lot of time I’m in sweat pants watching a movie. People are hungry for things that are in the moment, authentic, not Photoshopped.”

Chew on that. And don’t worry about the spinach in your teeth.

Noted: On a Phone App Called Tinder, Looks Are Everything

Rather, the action is happening on a new smartphone app, and no, it isn’t Grindr.

“Anytime I’m at a dinner or an event, social or business, people are buzzing about Tinder,” said Erica Berman, 28, an events planner in Manhattan who said that she uses the app several times a day.

Ms. Berman is not alone. Technology has hit a new level of shallow, and New York’s 20-somethings are embracing it full speed.

Introduced to college campuses in September, Tinder taps into the most superficial aspect of the dating scene. After downloading the app and selecting their gender, location and whether they like men or women (or both), users swipe through a stack of profile photos (left for “nope,” right for “liked”), based on little more than the person’s appearance. If two users “like” each other, they can proceed to have an online conversation.

Tinder has been compared to Hot or Not, the once-popular photo rating site, as reimagined in the age of Facebook. Indeed, the app is linked to a user’s Facebook account, automatically pulling in a person’s profile, photographs and mutual friends.

“You don’t have to fill out a profile, you don’t have to put in info — you just have to like the way someone looks,” said Anne Ryan, a 23-year-old project manager in the West Village, who was introduced to Tinder over brunch. “Besides, if I don’t think someone is hot, or if they don’t think I’m pretty, no one ever finds out.”

Unusual for a dating app, Tinder appeals to men and women, homosexuals and heterosexuals. That was by design.

“Irrespective of preference, Tinder solves a basic human need, which is to meet and connect with new people,” said Sean Rad, 26, who started Tinder with Justin Mateen, also 26. “In the real world, you see someone’s face and you decide if you have an attraction to them.”

In the seven months since Tinder was released to iPhone users, the app has logged 2.4 billion profile ratings and 21 million matches, said Mr. Mateen, a high-tech entrepreneur who lives in Los Angeles.

To those who criticize the app for prizing looks over compatibility, Mr. Mateen noted that “approximately 70 percent of those matches have resulted in a two-way conversation.” Moreover, he said, the company has received six videos of couples who met on Tinder and are now engaged.

Jesse Morris, 25, a handsome marketing executive in Murray Hill, said that he won’t be getting engaged anytime soon, but he uses Tinder to cast a wider net. “Bars don’t attract everyone, and when you’re in a bar, all the best-looking girls are under a magnifying glass from every guy,” he said. “Because Tinder requires its users to independently indicate interest, you don’t need to work through that competition and clutter.”

Mr. Rad and Mr. Mateen would agree. They aren’t just the founders of Tinder, they are users, too.

“Justin met the girl he is dating pretty seriously right now on Tinder,” Mr. Rad said about his co-founder. “He is embarrassed to say the serious part.”

Noted: A Vibrator That Will Make Her Thankful for the Memory

An erotic toy with built-in flash memory is the latest addition to a growing, evolving industry. The toy’s maker is Crave, a new San Francisco company begun by a Stanford University designer-engineer whose Duet vibrator started showing up this year in stores like Good Vibrations in San Francisco and Babeland in New York and recently hit a handful of boutique retailers around the country.

The Duet Lux looks like a sleek tuning fork, with a silicone tip and a gold-plated band. Open it up and discover a USB port with 8 gigabytes of memory (for $219), or pay $349 for 16 gigs and a gold-plated base.

The obvious question: Why computer memory? Has multitasking jumped the shark?

Including memory was not Crave’s original intent. The idea was simply that the device’s USB port would be chargeable by computer, eliminating the need for cords or batteries.

But “a bunch of the testers asked: ‘Can we store stuff on this?’ ” said Michael Topolovac, a co-founder of Crave and a Stanford graduate who has founded two previous start-ups, one building underwater cameras and the other cloud computing software.

Mr. Topolovac said testers and others explained that they would like to use vibrator memory to store private material — not just erotic files, but documents. Users can remove the vibrating part at the top, he said, and be left with what might pass at a Starbucks as just a fancy flash memory stick. “I use it for my V.C. presentations,” he added.

More broadly, the Duet looks to be an exception that proves the rule. The exception: Mr. Topolovac said there do not appear to be other vibrators on the market with a built-in computer memory, though there are a growing number that can be charged through via USB ports.

The rule proved by the exception: a lot of design and innovation is coming to the vibrator category, reflecting a growing mainstream retail market. Last year, for instance, Walgreens began carrying Trojan-made vibrators, alongside other personal items like lubricant. In the third quarter of 2012, Trojan said, it sold 273,000 vibrators at food, drug and mass retailers (like Walgreens, CVS and Duane Reade), citing Nielsen, a market research firm.

Last year, Brookstone started selling a line of Pleasure Objects, vibrators made by a company called Lelo. It, and other companies, have been pushing luxury and design-centric vibrators, hoping to keep moving the business from one with a reputation for novelty toys toward lifestyle brands.

In the case of Crave, adding computer memory to a sex toy is just the beginning of the innovation.

“Next year, we’ll be introducing products with memory and wireless capability,” Mr. Topolovac said. Wireless? “To control the device,” he said vaguely, but declined to elaborate as to exactly how that might work or why it would be useful, citing that Silicon Valley standby: fear of divulging intellectual property secrets before their time.

Crave draws not just its ethos but its heroes from Silicon Valley. Crave’s other co-founder, Ti Chang, is a woman with an industrial design background who Mr. Topolovac insists can become to vibrators what Jonathan Ive, the design guru at Apple, is to user-friendly computing.

“On my best day, I’m a mediocre Steve Jobs,” he said, “and her regular day, she’s a Jony Ive.”

Noted: Models Take to Twitter to Complain

On top of that, there’s also no place to turn when you want to complain. Until now.

Thanks to Twitter and the smartphones that seem glued to their palms, models can now air their grievances — like the bizarre dress that they had to wear, or the lack of food at chic parties — followed by the hashtag “#ModelProblems.”

That came in handy for Jourdan Dunn, the 5-foot-10 model from London, during the hustle of Milan Fashion Week last month. She posted a series of complaints, including one that read: “When you are getting interview backstage and the journalist asks you to describe the collection and you haven’t got a clue #ModelProblems.” Another read: “Not knowing how to pronounce the designer name.”

Ms. Dunn was probably joking, since a little digging reveals that she sent that last Twitter message — about not knowing how to pronounce a designer’s name — on the same day that she walked the Alessandro Dell’Acqua show in Milan. (She has also repeated that joke in interviews.)

Lesser-known models seem to use #ModelProblems to voice more workaday worries. “Lingerie shoot and its freezing #ModelProblems,” wrote Frida Munting, a British model who has done ads for Topshop and United Colors of Benetton. “A makeup artist has just spent close to an hour painting my lips and now I really, really want some sushi,” wrote Holly Kagis, a model from Sydney, Australia, before a runway show at the Perth Fashion Festival on Sept. 22.

But most models seem to have taken to the hashtag with a measure of irony. There is even an anonymous Twitter handle named Model Problems, started last December, that is devoted to airing modeling grievances. (Its tagline: “I can’t find pants long enough, champagne is a food group, I’m so pretty that it hurts.”)

A posting on Sept. 8, in the middle of New York Fashion Week, read: “3 hrs of prep for 30 seconds of walking.” Another, posted about a week earlier, read: “Can some 16 year old model please teach me how to put my book on this iPad, argh.”

The popularity of #ModelProblems follows a familiar trope in popular culture that serves as a wink of self-awareness about the everyday complaints of otherwise privileged people. “White People Problems” is the running joke of several humor blogs — a theme that found its pop culture apotheosis in 2011 when it was used by the comedian Louis C. K. in one of his standup routines (most of which can’t be reprinted here).

And while the device has been used by comedians and bloggers to make fun of themselves and others, Twitter users have added their own sly, ironic twist to the self-effacement.

Hashtags like “#FirstWorldProblems” are regularly appended to Twitter complaints like “Can’t use the bathroom because the cleaning lady is cleaning it,” or “Too many clothes, not enough hangers.” Twitter handles like White Whine and First World Life are dedicated to these jokes, and have thousands of followers.

Few would expect these whiners to garner much sympathy, whether they are complaining about their lives of privilege or their good looks. But the opposite seems to happen, according to Paul Levinson, a professor of communication and media studies at Fordham University in New York.

People enjoy reading these grievances because it can make the complainer “seem more human, someone that can be related to,” Professor Levinson said.

Indeed, the responses to Ms. Dunn’s Twitter complaints have been overwhelmingly positive. The Huffington Post even featured one of her Twitter messages (“When the 40 or 41 size shoe doesn’t fit #ModelProblems #BigFootModelProblems”) among its “best (and funniest) fashion-related tweets” of the week in September.

Her Twitter followers expressed sympathy. “I have the exact same problem,” wrote a self-described student with fashion aspirations who goes by @teearghh. “Same shoe sizes too & im not even a model.”

Noted: Celebrity Hoax Death Reports

Word of Mr. Danza’s demise circulated this month when a shady news source called Global Associated News ran a story saying he “died while filming in New Zealand,” having fallen “more than 60 feet to his death on the Kauri Cliffs.”

Mr. Danza’s appearance on the “Today” show, where he was promoting a new book, helped put that rumor to rest.

But in an age of Twitter and microblogging platforms, celebrity death hoaxes have become yet another pitfall of fame. Other celebrities to have “died” in recent weeks include Morgan Freeman (artery rupture), 50 Cent (private plane crash), Eddie Murphy (snowboarding accident) and Jerry Springer (auto accident).

In each case, they were hoaxes created by a user for no clear reason other than entertainment. Mark Bell, an adjunct professor at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis, who studies deception in digital media, likened the hoaxes to childhood pranks.

“People like to lie,” he said. “They get a thrill from it. There is a little hit of dopamine when you lie, especially a lie that is believed by somebody else.”

Many of the fake deaths, including Mr. Danza’s, were generated on Fake a Wish, a Web site that promotes a “celebrity fake news hoax generator” that allows anyone to create a baseless story attributed to Global Associated News.

The pranks aren’t victimless. Mr. Springer was told that he died while driving a friend’s vehicle on a highway. He immediately checked in with his family. “My wife couldn’t read it,” he said. “It was just too difficult for her.”

Celebrity death hoaxes are not new. Mr. Bell pointed to the rumors surrounding Mark Twain in 1897, to which he famously responded, “The report of my death was an exaggeration.” What’s different today, he said, is the ease and speed with which such rumors can be created and circulated.

Often, all it takes is a Twitter hashtag or Facebook page to set a hoax in motion, as has happened to Bill Cosby, Jon Bon Jovi and Justin Bieber, who over the years has been shot in nightclubs, died in car crashes and overdosed on drugs.

“There’s not a lot of cost, either financially, morally, legally or criminally in doing this,” Mr. Bell said.

Death hoax victims aren’t limited to humans. Boo, a fluffy Pomeranian with more than 5.3 million Facebook fans, was said to have died in a Twitter message posted by Sam Biddle, a writer for the technology blog Gizmodo.

Mr. Biddle said that the message was mostly just a joke aimed at colleagues and that he “had zero expectation of it actually turning into a certifiable death rumor.” But soon, it was reposted and took on a life of its own.

April Whitney, Boo’s publicist at Chronicle Books, which has published a book about the dog, said the news was “like walking into your house and realizing you’ve been robbed.” But she admitted that the hoax may have attracted new fans and sold books. “It actually ended up helping a little bit at the end,” she said.

Noted: Social Media Speeds Up Criticism of Olympians - Noted

Thanks to the rise of social media, reverence for athletic achievement at the Olympics can now be measured in milliseconds. Even as Gabby Douglas was performing the routines that would earn her the all-around gold medal in gymnastics, a few Twitter users were criticizing her ponytailed clipped coif.

On Friday, Joe Scarborough ran a video clip of the American women’s soccer team’s gold-medal game, in which Carli Lloyd scored two goals for the team and went on to say: “When someone tells me I can’t do something, I’m going to prove them wrong. That’s what a champion is all about and that’s what I am: a champion.”

Mr. Scarborough and his cohorts then jumped on Ms. Lloyd for using the first-person singular too much (“There’s no ‘I’ in team”), questioning her chances for an endorsement deal.

By 8 a.m., during the show’s repeat coverage, the segment was gone (due to a video rights issue, a representative of the show wrote in an e-mail).

But it was only the latest example in a week of sniping that included brutish commentary from Conan O’Brien and others about Holley Mangold, the American weight lifter and sister of the New York Jets center Nick Mangold. “I predict 350 lb. weight lifter Holley Mangold will bring home the gold and 4 guys against their will,” Mr. O’Brien posted to his Twitter account.

The British swimmer Rebecca Adlington’s looks were criticized. “I worry that Rebecca Adlington will have an unfair advantage in the swimming by possessing a dolphin’s face,” wrote the comedian Frankie Boyle.

Ms. Adlington’s American counterpart, Allison Schmitt, may have fared even worse. The Canton, Mich., native was said to look and sound “retarded” by a multitude of social media users, as the sports site Deadspin pointed out.

Will the London Olympics one day be remembered as a cesspool of electronic negativity?

Past Games, of course, have not been without catty commentary. But formerly it was mostly aired, then snuffed, in living rooms, with television slow motion rendering the athletes more divine than human. The gymnast Mary Lou Retton’s thighs were strong rather than chunky, and the sprinter Florence Griffith-Joyner’s nails were flamboyant, not trashy.

Unlike seasoned survivors of media maelstroms like Kobe Bryant, many current Olympians compete in obscure fields and are pitched into the spotlight only every few years, making them less experienced at addressing the haters.

Ms. Douglas, at least, showed considerable savvy. Appointed a Procter & Gamble beauty ambassador just before the Olympic trials, she took the opportunity to inform Us Weekly: “I use great Pantene products in my hair. They make my hair silky, shiny and healthy.”

Noted: A YouTube Series: ‘Real Actors Read Yelp Reviews’

“I ordered the broiled crab cakes and they were really good,” says Chris Kipiniak with the pained gravitas of a cuckold recounting his wife’s affair. He then recounts the stilted conversation with a manager who seemed “rushed.”

“I don’t think I’m going to eat there anymore,” Mr. Kipiniak concludes, fighting back sobs. “If the manager isn’t nice, then what does that say about the business you’re running, and the people in it?”

Another angry Yelp reviewer? Not exactly. Mr. Kipiniak is an actor from Manhattan, starring in a new YouTube series called “Real Actors Read Yelp Reviews.” It is part of an emerging video genre that mines the Web for raw material, and converts readers’ comments, Twitter posts and other user-generated content into comedy.

In the video, Mr. Kipiniak reads from a one-star review of the Stratford Diner in New Jersey that was posted on Yelp last year by a user with the name Dalia B. Uploaded last Friday, the video has generated 230,000-plus views, after being picked up by sites like Yahoo! News and Mashable.

The Atlantic called the videos (which take a bit of artistic license with the original material) “a review of Yelp itself — one that both celebrates and eviscerates the site’s particular brand of comically weaponized consumerism.”

In a phone interview, Mr. Kipiniak said the earnestness of the reviewer’s hurt feelings over such a trifle made it prime comedic fodder. “While it seems sort of absurd, the person left the review with no irony,” he said, laughing. “They didn’t find anything funny about it at all.”

The video was the brainchild of Joe Plummer, an actor from New York, who said the idea came when he and his wife, Natalie Markoff, saw a billboard for a restaurant they had been meaning to visit. He found the Yelp reviews and read them aloud while his wife drove.

“We had to pull the car over at one point, we were laughing so hard, just crying with laughter,” said Mr. Plummer, who runs Gotta Kid to Feed, a small production company in Manhattan that produced the video.

“There’s something about the promise of online anonymity, I guess, that allows people to just really go for it,” he said.

If traditional comedy is all timing, this new strand of Web comedy is all about context. Kevin Allocca, the manager of YouTube Trends, pointed to a recent skit on Jimmy Kimmel Live with celebrities like Kristen Stewart and Katy Perry reading nasty tweets about themselves. “Zooey Deschanel is overrated,” reads Zooey Deschanel.

(Not to complain here, but this idea goes back about a half-century; a mock-indignant Steve Allen read letters from seriously annoyed Daily News readers on his late-night show.)

“These little slices of our Web experience — social media posts, customer reviews — have become such a part of our daily lives that we can sit back and collectively laugh at the absurd elements of them if they’re presented in the right way,” Mr. Allocca wrote in an e-mail.

Mr. Plummer seems to have struck the right chord. In a second installation posted Monday, Therese Plummer, an actress who happens to be his sister, reads a glowing review of an Indian restaurant in Newport Beach, Calif. The Yelp review, posted in May by Nathan A. is enthusiastic, but takes some graphic turns.

“The food is fantastic and you will be thinking about your meal long after it’s over,” Ms. Plummer says, before describing “tender, moist pieces of dark meat chicken, smothered in this delicious sauce with tomatoes, honey, cardamom and what I’m assuming is a pound of laxatives.”

She awards the restaurant four stars, “minus one star for expensive biryani and for turning me into a human flame thrower.”

Noted: A YouTube Series: ‘Real Actors Read Yelp Reviews’

“I ordered the broiled crab cakes and they were really good,” says Chris Kipiniak with the pained gravitas of a cuckold recounting his wife’s affair. He then recounts the stilted conversation with a manager who seemed “rushed.”

“I don’t think I’m going to eat there anymore,” Mr. Kipiniak concludes, fighting back sobs. “If the manager isn’t nice, then what does that say about the business you’re running, and the people in it?”

Another angry Yelp reviewer? Not exactly. Mr. Kipiniak is an actor from Manhattan, starring in a new YouTube series called “Real Actors Read Yelp Reviews.” It is part of an emerging video genre that mines the Web for raw material, and converts readers’ comments, Twitter posts and other user-generated content into comedy.

In the video, Mr. Kipiniak reads from a one-star review of the Stratford Diner in New Jersey that was posted on Yelp last year by a user with the name Dalia B. Uploaded last Friday, the video has generated 230,000-plus views, after being picked up by sites like Yahoo! News and Mashable.

The Atlantic called the videos (which take a bit of artistic license with the original material) “a review of Yelp itself — one that both celebrates and eviscerates the site’s particular brand of comically weaponized consumerism.”

In a phone interview, Mr. Kipiniak said the earnestness of the reviewer’s hurt feelings over such a trifle made it prime comedic fodder. “While it seems sort of absurd, the person left the review with no irony,” he said, laughing. “They didn’t find anything funny about it at all.”

The video was the brainchild of Joe Plummer, an actor from New York, who said the idea came when he and his wife, Natalie Markoff, saw a billboard for a restaurant they had been meaning to visit. He found the Yelp reviews and read them aloud while his wife drove.

“We had to pull the car over at one point, we were laughing so hard, just crying with laughter,” said Mr. Plummer, who runs Gotta Kid to Feed, a small production company in Manhattan that produced the video.

“There’s something about the promise of online anonymity, I guess, that allows people to just really go for it,” he said.

If traditional comedy is all timing, this new strand of Web comedy is all about context. Kevin Allocca, the manager of YouTube Trends, pointed to a recent skit on Jimmy Kimmel Live with celebrities like Kristen Stewart and Katy Perry reading nasty tweets about themselves. “Zooey Deschanel is overrated,” reads Zooey Deschanel.

(Not to complain here, but this idea goes back about a half-century; a mock-indignant Steve Allen read letters from seriously annoyed Daily News readers on his late-night show.)

“These little slices of our Web experience — social media posts, customer reviews — have become such a part of our daily lives that we can sit back and collectively laugh at the absurd elements of them if they’re presented in the right way,” Mr. Allocca wrote in an e-mail.

Mr. Plummer seems to have struck the right chord. In a second installation posted Monday, Therese Plummer, an actress who happens to be his sister, reads a glowing review of an Indian restaurant in Newport Beach, Calif. The Yelp review, posted in May by Nathan A. is enthusiastic, but takes some graphic turns.

“The food is fantastic and you will be thinking about your meal long after it’s over,” Ms. Plummer says, before describing “tender, moist pieces of dark meat chicken, smothered in this delicious sauce with tomatoes, honey, cardamom and what I’m assuming is a pound of laxatives.”

She awards the restaurant four stars, “minus one star for expensive biryani and for turning me into a human flame thrower.”