The platform I used was a chatroom service called Zobe. I hadn’t heard of it before; I came across it in a google search for “safe chat room.” I was greeted with this screen:

Right off the bat, you’re being forced to categorize yourself. The options from which you select your age are heavily indicative of this site’s intended user demographic. As the age ranges go up in years, they also increase in range. The 13 to 17 group covers four years, the 18 to 23 group covers five, and the last one is just anything at or above 24. If you’re 23, you’ll be put into a different category than if you were 24; if you’re 25, you could be put into the same category as an 86-year-old. This implies that the site’s intended audience is relatively young (around 24 years old at the high end).

The “girl/guy” question shows that the site anticipates its users to fit neatly into one of those two boxes. Either they don’t get many nonbinary users, or they just don’t care.

In terms of my actual performance, I initially had a few different ideas. I ended up deciding to ask some questions in a chat room, and then take snippets of other users’ responses and use the words do a Mad Lib.

Each time I entered a chat room, I recorded my screen for the duration of the session. I then rewatched the sessions with a Mad Lib pulled up next to them.

I would pick a place in the conversation to start, and from there I would fill the blanks in the Mad Lib with the first word of that kind to appear in the chat. In this example, the Mad Lib first asked for a noun, so I picked one from the chat. From then on, I filled each blank with the next compatible, nonrepeating word from the chat.

Note: I did these Mad Libs without first looking at the end result; I put in the words blind.

Since I needed my topic or question to be controversial enough to guarantee a response, I started with questions like, “What are your feelings about Donald Trump?” After plugging words from the responses to that question into an online Mad Lib generator, I was confronted with this:

Not all of it makes sense, but there are a couple winners (“a physique like Donald Trump” and “a profile like Hitler” were two of my personal favorites).

In a separate chat at a later date, I asked “Do you guys have anything you want to say?” I used words from those responses. The responses to that question led to this:

Overall, I was impressed by how infrequently people swore and insulted each other. My questions were being acknowledged and responded to. So far, things were going well.

Until they weren’t.

I asked the same question as the first time: “What are you guys’ feelings about Donald Trump?” But the conversation quickly devolved. Here is the Mad Lib created from those responses (warning for use of homophobic slurs by an anonymous user).

 The results were, admittedly, hit-and-miss. In general, it’s safe to say that online chat rooms (or at least the ones I was in) are not exactly a font of open-mindedness and wit. One user, out of the blue, declared that

Aside from all the negativity, chat room services like Zobe seem to be an easily accessible place for people to voice their opinion. The site never asks for an email, phone number, or for you to create an account, meaning anyone with an internet connection can use it. It provides free, anonymous interaction—something that was once highly sought after on the internet. The anonymity allows people to say what they want with little consequence.

Chat rooms can be a great place. That said, enter at your own risk.

I decided to (AB)USE Instagram. I’ve been using it a lot lately, but I’ve never really thought much about how it works beyond the posting, liking, commenting, and using hashtags to put your picture in a group with similar pictures.

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I am someone who subscribes to a lot of newsletters but rarely ever reads any of them.  When starting this project, I had over 10,000 unread emails, the majority of which I can guarantee were either spam or unwanted news letters.

    I decided to take a 3 day input of my emails.  So in three days I had received 279 emails.  22 of those I had read while the rest I either wanted to unsubscribe from the newsletter or wasn’t interested in the article sent to me.  So, I clicked the spam and unsubscribe bubble on google for 207 emails.  My project thus was to determine how many of these e-mails would actually get unsubscribed and which one’s would continue sending me newsletters.

Overall, I thought the project went better as expected.  And by better, I mean far more of my e-mails have stayed in the spam folder than not.  There are some persistent e-mails though.  For example above the second to last reported e-mail was from Groupon which I have in the past unsubscribed to multiple times and still receive emails from them.  Of course, this time was no different as I still got an e-mail from Groupon after unsubscribing.

I read up on Groupon’s e-mail practices and I am not the only one with such an issue.

In fact, Groupon’s e-mail marketing is such a problem that the Australian Communications and Media Authority issued a warning to the company about its’ unsubscribe process.  Apparently when signing up one signs up for multiple different types of Groupon newsletters thus to unsubscribe one has to unsubscribe to each and every kind of newsletter instead of just one of them.  Unfortunately, this seems like an ordeal that I’ll have to contact customer support over.  I am happy I learned about interesting laws such as the Spam Act in Australia which regulates commercial marketing and necessitates the need for a functional unsubscribe button, informed consent, and proper identification.

Despite hangups with groupons unsubscribe process most unsubscribing and sending to the spam box worked out well, with even a couple of lists I was subscribed to sending me a confirmation e-mail that I was removed from the list.  It is possible though that I will have other groupon like e-mail problems though as many newsletters I receive only come once a week or are somewhat infrequent.  Thus it is possible by Friday I could still be receiving e-mails from sources I shouldn’t be.

For my project, I decided to take the common social media platform Instagram and use it in a manner contrary to what it was intended to be. I decided to take a black screen and post it on instagram as if it were a real photo, and add a caption to make it seem like there is content in the picture. I tagged each picture #blindinstagramproject, and wanted to see how many people would “like” a picture if there was nothing in it.

In addition, I was taking note of how many/which people liked it, because there is a trend on Instagram of liking every post on your timeline, regardless of the content.

What I found is that, with every picture I posted, the only people who liked them were members of my family. I take that to mean they will like things I post regardless of context. They’ll support me with whatever stupid stuff I post on my social media. Interestingly, I didn’t get anyone asking what the heck I was doing posting black screens on Instagram every day. It shows that people don’t take the time to question when weird things show up on their timeline, they’ll just accept the weirdness and move on.

This last picture is to show comparison between the amount of likes I got on the three pictures for the project and ones I have posted previously. As you can see, the amount of likes on the previous posts are exponentially bigger than the ones for the project.

In doing this project, my hypothesis of people just liking posts without paying attention to the content was proven to be false. However, there were people who did like my posts, members of my own family. I didn’t anticipate this, but it goes to show how family will support you even when what you’re doing makes no sense.

For Project 1 I explored with gmail for the weekend. My plan for approaching this was to look around at all the controls and widgets that gmail offers. An average user of this application just checks there inbox, and sends emails for the most part. The intended audience is students and people in the workplace who rely on communication and file sharing. I use gmail every single day and I only use it for those few functions. So the first part that I decieded to look was the chat portion of gmail which they call Hangouts. I remember using AIM back in the day through AOL, but I’ve never used googles instant messaging. There are three main buttons for this call/text function and they are Hangout Contact, Hangout Conversations and Phone Calls.

This picture is of the chat window and it’s in the bottom left area of the desktop window on the gmail webpage. This means that Google definitely still demes this a useful part of the application considering its so prominent on the screen every time you log into gmail You can add contacts, set moods, chat, and call too. For my calls they were free, but for international calls there is a charge. When you click the call button, there is a dollar sign that pops up next to an american flag.

The hangouts dashboard is put together very nicely. It is clear to see the simple and clean look of the interface. There is not too many colors or smaller buttons like an average desktop application. It has the look of a mobile smartphone like an iPhone or Galaxy. After using all of the communication functions on gmail, it is clear to see that this application has everything to offer. The majority of people at this point in time use there smartphones for calling and messaging through a carrier but this is an easy alternative if you are using a computer. All my reactions to this part of gmail show that it is basically trying to have an app for every form of networking. Email is definitely still used for school and work pretty often. And googles attempt to intertwine all these different apps into gmail sure shows that they have somewhere to store everything for you. By clicking through that chats calls and contacts, Google will redirect you to different layouts to interact with such as Google Voice, Google Contacts, and the Hangouts app which is on iOS and Android as well. Google provides an easy way to communicate in any form. It’s funny because I honestly get confused because Google has so many different sub applications that all have similar interfaces.

Another function of gmail that I used was the gmail labs. These are little programs that will change how your gmail works for you. So in a sense your customizing certain functions, but the lab can be taken off gmail at any time because they are tests. I felt a little bit of freedom having this capability of using these tests. So I sent in feedback to google complaining that Auto-Advance doesn’t work so that it would get taken off labs.

Gmail allows you to have custom themes on your desktop. The background is filled with a pre downloaded theme, or an image of your choice. I took a screenshot of my page and set it as the theme. I repeated this 4-5 times, making it so that the final image was a montage of many buttons and messages. This causes a lot of confusion when navigating through the page because you kind of forget which button works and which is from the image. Under settings you can click the share your theme, and gmail will provide you with a link of your theme. I emailed my theme to 5 of my good friends with the pre written phrase that Google provides for you..

Hey,

I’m using a custom theme in Gmail on the Web and I think you’ll like it too!

Check it out on your desktop or laptop.

https://mail.google.com/mail/?tm=1#settings/themes/customlight?https%3A%2F%2Flh3.googleusercontent.com%2F-j4MZyksspSU%2FWm99qh-QVRI%2FAAAAAAAAELA%2FU6NH0_fHO_4MVhq2IDF7QQiiH6yW2XyXQCLcBGAs%2Fs0%2FScreen%252BShot%252B2018-01-29%252Bat%252B2.01.18%252BPM.png

I thought using the application for something it’s not meant for would be sort of funny. It’s clear to see that gmail is very easy to use and the reason for having the themes is to make it even easier and more tailored for the user. And by making one very confusing I thought that would disrupt the system of gmail. I didn’t say anything to the people I shared the theme with, I just send the one that gmail provided me with

Background, Plan:

I chose to use Instagram and their Stories feature for my performance piece. Instagram rolled out their Stories feature in 2016 but I’ve never used it before, so I was excited to experiment with it and see how it impacted both my user experience and how it reflected the experience of my followers.

I decided to play with the literal meaning of a “story” as a described sequence of events. I chose to showcase someone else’s story, challenging the convention of posting my own personal stories to my personal account.  I uploaded photos to the slideshow gallery format and used them to tell a short story piece-by-piece over three days. I used words instead of pictures or video to describe the sequence of events to mimic the action of reading a book and to stand out against the expected photo/video format of Instagram stories. I intentionally kept the pieces visually consistent to show that they were part of the same story, but I changed the background colors to differentiate between installments. I posted each installment exactly 24 hours apart so only the third of the story that I wanted to showcase would be live at any given time. I observed how people responded and interacted with it based on the number of views and direct-message responses. Because Instagram approves of and almost encourages oversharing by allowing an unlimited number of story posts, I felt comfortable posting 8-10 pieces of a story per day.  

I chose to use a song that told a story rather than a published short story from a book because the line and verse breaks allowed for an easy way to distinguish story installments. The shorter text of a song was more appropriate for the three-day time frame. I shared a verse from “Danny, Dakota & the Wishing Well” by A Silent Film (2012) every day for three days. Each line from a verse was its own post to my story.

• Audio: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZZvHBvzrKIg
• Lyrics: https://genius.com/A-silent-film-danny-dakota-and-the-wishing-well-lyrics

Day 1, Verse 1 – 10 posts: 

Day 2, Verse 2 – 9 posts: 

Day 3, Verse 3 – 8 posts: 

Audience Reaction: 

• Day 1: 203 → 160 (lost 43 people, 78% finished)
• Day 2: 170 → 135 (lost 35 people, 79% finished)
• Day 3: 176 → 126 (lost 50 people, 71% finished)

From the first to last post I retained about 62% of viewers.

I received 3 direct messages responding to or questioning my story posts. These are from (in order) a good friend, my best friend, and then an acquaintance. I also got a couple confused comments from friends in person.

Conclusion, Evaluation:

I had several questions before beginning the experiment:

• How many people would choose to view my story? I have a public account with 538 followers, so my story was visible to anyone who wanted to look.
• Will people be curious/interested and tap through until the end, or will they get bored and swipe away before they’re finished? Will their interest span multiple days, or will it diminish significantly by the third day where people will know what to expect?
• Will creating a “boring” story through sharing impersonal content lead to people unfollowing my account? How will it affect responses through direct-message? Will deviating from an expected posting style confuse close friends and/or strangers?  
• In a broader sense, is the unlimited Instagram Stories format effective in engaging users? How much content can you provide and still have people realistically tap all the way through? How does producing consistent, predictable content affect viewer retention? 

My first post in the first installment got 203 views (38% of followers), which dropped to 126 views (23% of followers) by the final post of the third installment. This drop in viewers over time was expected, but I was definitely surprised that 203 people were even willing to view my story to begin with. I was also surprised to see that most people (over 70%) tapped through to the end of the story once they had started the sequence, and this percentage didn’t diminish significantly over three days. I wasn’t surprised to see the amount of viewers decline over the course of the individual installations as well as over the course of the experiment. I lost two followers over the three days, but since my follower count fluctuates every couple of days because of spam/bot followers my overall follower count seems unaffected by the performance (admittedly, a relief). I was surprised that one of my acquaintances reached out to comment on my posts but I was happy to share her enthusiasm for the song. Changing my posting style from occasional, highly curated posts to a high number of seemingly random stories definitely attracted attention from the people who know me well; it’s interesting to see how much we can infer about a person from sudden changes in their online habits. 

I would be interested to see how the results changed with an experiment that used a longer, more complex story over a longer period of time or challenged the idea of an unlimited Instagram Story. I think the results of the experiment would have been much more dramatic even if I had continued it for just a fourth day. I’d also love to see the retention data for brands/artists that regularly share large amounts of consistent content on their stories – sharing content this way seems much more visible than I initially realized. 

For project 1 I chose to focus on the people who pop up on the “Needs Love” section of Snapchat.  The names who show up in this section are people you haven’t snapped in a long time and is Snapchat’s way to make you interact more with someone you may not have talked to in a while and therefor use their app longer to keep a conversation up with an old friend.  Well as it turns out nobody wants to respond to a Tindr match from three years ago.

My guidelines for this was to send the Needs Love people a random picture at any time of day.  Looking back I wish I would have set a more strict set of rules for this project such as sending a snap at a certain time of day or a specific image. However, I don’t think it would have changed the results too drastically.

Day 1

The People Who Needed Love

The Picture Sent

My sweet cat, Clarence

The Results

Observations

I’m not that surprise that Brittney didn’t respond because I haven’t spoken to her since the beginning of freshmen year of college.  Sanjel is my cousin so I was a little sad that she didn’t respond to a picture of my cat, but she also never texts me back so I guess I shouldn’t have been that disappointed about it.  Emily was the only person to respond of the three and she sent back a picture of her cat as well and suggested we set up a play date for them.

Day 2

The Picture Sent

I wasn’t even outside but there are somehow clouds. Also excited to say I made that filter.

The Results

Observations

This was the most successful day.  Richard is an old friend from middle school and even though we exchanged a few quick snaps it was still nice that he even responded.  Abby is someone I have probably had a total of three conversations with throughout high school so I was very surprised she responded which was interesting considering we never talked. I was actually disappointed Feenix didn’t respond since I was in our hometown and I had spoken to her barely a month ago.

Day 3

The People Who Needed Love

The Picture Sent

The Results

Observations

Absolutely no responses and actually Becca didn’t even open it.  Nick is an old Tindr match from fall 2015 that I quickly ghosted so no surprise at his lack of response.  Zach is someone I met during my time on the high school speech and I last saw him while we were judging a speech meet back in November, so once again it is not surprising I received no response.

Conclusion

I went into this thinking that it was going to be a lot harder than it actually was, but thats only because I lucked out on who Needed Love.  I wouldn’t mind repeating this again and trying to make it a little more personal or strange with the snaps.

I tried to implement my project in a few different ways. My idea was to show the picture of a picture, what was behind the camera. I posted mainly to Instagram, a photo platform where it would be a bit weird to show what goes on behind the scenes when what is usually shown is the final product. I commented on the posts like normal. I posted my first one also to Facebook to see if I could get any reactions from people not following me on Instagram. Since I hadn’t posted to Instagram in a while, I hoped the algorithm would be on my side and post closer to the top of people’s threads than if I had just constantly posting but I don’t really have that much control over it.

Over all, I didn’t get any responses questioning anything or even commenting on them. Most of my friends just liked it and maybe thought I was just being me. Since I noticed this, on the third and final day, I used a different phone in the final one to hopefully get a different response but now I realize I was probably fighting the algorithm and it might now have even shown up in order on people’s timelines. I think Instagram was the right platform but not this Instagram, maybe a past version without the algorithm. Maybe Snapchat would have been the better option for this. Since my account is public, random people can find me and random people that don’t follow me liked some of the photos.

Although this wasn’t as “successful” as I hoped it would be, it has given me ideas for future projects. How many steps back can I take this? How many phones can I get involved into this project? I think asking random people, whether I know them or not, to use their phone to take a picture of my phone or vice versa is a performance in itself. I tried not to explain what I was doing but they seemed interested in it once they saw me snap the picture. I think I would like to continue this series and try different ways of showing the weird perspective of taking pictures for social media.

We have talked about the “…” when texting or messaging, but this one is specific to commenting. I’m in a lot of Facebook groups and tend to post a lot of funny comments (that may be subjective but I digress). When I post something funny, or a question, or even something that may get people mad, this “…” really makes me anxious. I want someone to respond to me and I don’t know who it is or what they are going to say at all. The dots jump and change from grey to black. The box itself just comes up when anyone is typing. It used to say “a friend is typing” or something similar to that but now these dots just seem to follow me everywhere in social media. The bouncing almost mimics typing in a way but still leaves me wonder who is typing and what they are typing and if they are even responding to me. It drives me nuts it’s almost as bad as checking from “likes” or “reactions” as they are called now. If they don’t respond and decide against commenting, I never get the closure I’m waiting for. I wonder how many times I’ve done that to someone else.

To me, these dots are different from the normal dots we see when messaging personally. These are open to anyone, more “anonymous”. I feel more like a stand up comedian who can’t see the audience and if anyone laughed at the joke I just said. It’s more of an open platform and just as nerve wracking as the personal message “…”.

I find this interesting how facebook tries to make an emotional attachment with me. By showing me an older photo that I previously posted, facebook hopes for me to tie my connection from that memory into the post itself. On top of that, there are phrases like “we care about you and the memories you share” and “We thought you’d like to look back on this.” Facebook in a sense puts words in our mouth and reels you in. Obviously facebook doesn’t care about anything except using our info to make money. But instead of saying that up front, they use Your Facebook Memories to lie and make you feel happy and comfortable.

I don’t consider myself obsessed with Duolingo, but I do utilize it for keeping up on my Spanish skills. When I launch the website, however, I tend to immediately obsess about my stats. I scroll along the right side of the page, scanning my stats to see where I stand. Typically, nothing really changes.

After checking in with my stats panel, I’ll look over my practiced skills on the left side of the page. It’s interesting to note that while the skills section takes up a majority of the page, I always start by scanning the stats bar on the right.

Once I’ve reviewed my skills and their respective strength bars, I decide on my plan of action. I always start by trying to fill up at least one strength bar on my previously full skills each time I’m on Duolingo. If all of my bars are full, I’ll go on to the next skill lesson on my path (which would cause another strength bar to show up).

Below, you can see two screen shots showing the strength bars in various stages of completion. In the top image, you can see many full strength bars. The skill icon even turns gold when that skill is fully strengthened. In the bottom image, you can see mostly in-progress strength bars. The icons are in full color, which helps to draw my attention to them.

Part of my obsession with checking my stats and running through a certain path has to do with how Duolingo determines my stats. As per the usual, completing a task fills up the meter. However, my strength bars will go down after inactivity. In the top image, you can see how my Basics 2 skill has gone down — that’s only the third level on Spanish! This is because I haven’t interacted with Duolingo and the content that’s in the skill section. When I took these screen shots, I was actually compelled to fill my Basics 2 strength bar all the way up, even though that’s not my normal path. The individual meters and declining stats due to inactivity definitely has me a bit hooked to keep them filled. If anything, it gives me something to look forward to doing each time I log in.

I focused on the website Quick Draw, which is a game from google where the user is given a word to draw in 20 seconds and an AI will try and guess what is being drawn. The user is providing drawings, which gives data to this AI so that it can become smarter and learn to recognize and distinguish different things from one another. It’s typical use to be played as a fun past time and the audience is likely anyone because it was used for data collection, but I think it was mostly used by younger people since it became popular through social media like Tumblr and YouTube.

Day 1: When I started on day 1, I just had the idea that I wanted to draw what I wasn’t being told to draw. My original idea was to see my art among all of the other drawings and if other people didn’t draw what they were supposed to or how long it would be before it got taken down. After my first round of drawing, I went through the data to try and find one of my drawings and I noticed that it wasn’t organized in any particular order, and the only dates I saw were in January or March of 2017 (which maybe was just coincidence with all the random ones I clicked but I clicked a LOT.) Knowing this, I assumed my drawings weren’t shown because either all of the data wasn’t shown or it was so randomly organized I never was able to find them, but I think that’s more unlikely since all of the months were only between January and March. Instead of observing my drawings in the data sets, I changed my plan to be to test the game and the AI’s intelligence by drawing what was asked in less traditional ways. I also tried to do my best and “win” by drawing what was asked, but I was never able to win since I drew differently than how the game is normally played. For each day I played the game about 10 times.

Day 1 Example: I didn’t know what I was doing so I drew cats at first since that was the example I gave in class. Halfway through, I thought I could draw cats vaguely shaped like what was being asked, as shown by the results above.

Day 2: I noticed when looking at the data sets that most drawings were drawn in one particular angle, so to test the AI’s knowledge I would draw everything upside down. Most of my drawings weren’t guessed, but when they were I noticed that the drawing could be reversible so they would make sense upside down. To do this, I started by drawing in a sketchbook to have reference and then transferred that to the computer so that it would be easier for me and more accurate for the game to guess.

For example, the AI wasn’t able to guess snail, which to me looks pretty obvious. It was able to guess toothpaste since all of the drawings of toothpaste were drawn from all sorts of angles, and no angle would technically be considered upside down. 

This one surprised me because I feel like a sword can be clearly distinguishable from all angles, but once again all of the data collected is drawn one way so this could lead my drawing to be taken out of the picture. Out of all the drawing tests I did on the program, doing them upside down was the most fun for me. None of my drawings are wrong because they’re upside down, so if it could be found in the data there isn’t a reason anyone should report it and it’s teaching the AI to see things in more ways than one (you know, maybe, or maybe not since I’m just one person so the drawings might not do much.)

Some problems that I think could stop this test from giving the best results are drawing ability, the times given, and how the program has a limited list of things to guess from which might make it guess the right thing because there’s nothing else left.

Day 3: For day 3 I did 2 different drawing tests. The first one was based on the fact that I noticed how little the program would need to guess certain things, so I wanted to draw the words in the most minimal way possible; by using only basic shapes. This was the closest I got to getting 6/6 right out of all of my attempts, which I think shows that the AI can recognize things based on position once again and simple structure. I think what ended up confusing the AI during this the most was the extra lines and spaces since I was trying to separate the shapes so what I was doing would come across more clearly, but it still was able to guess a lot right.

This was a good example to me of how little the AI needs to recognize things. I was really surprised at a lot of the drawings it got right, and I think looking at the data from these tests probably shows the most interesting results since it is so surprising in some cases.  

It was also really funny to me because I ended up drawing really similar stuff a lot of the time because I wanted to keep it simple. The ones guessed right that I drew basically the same you can kinda tell where they were coming from, but they really don’t have that much in common at all.

Some problems with this test were that some of the words were shapes, so drawing that made it easier. I also found it hard to draw the most simple form of something and definitely think that I could have drawn too much which may have skewed the answer as well. Finally I also think that the limited list is a problem once again, and I wanted to explore that idea as well.

Extra test: I wanted to try and draw other words that appeared similar to the word being suggested. The game tells you what the AI thinks you are doing before it guesses correctly, so I wanted to try and take those original guesses and draw those instead. This test was the least interesting because I was drawing a different word completely than the one I was supposed to, so the AI always / almost always guessed wrong. It did however guess the word that I was drawing each time so it did know what I was actually drawing.

Regardless of where I am, especially while I am just sitting around my apartment or at the library doing homework, my phone sits nearby with the screen up. My phone will light up if I get notifications and it immediately attracts my attention. Several months ago I decided muted the push notifications for the majority of apps on my phone (particularly all social media except Snapchat) in order to control what notifications are important to me and what is allowed to distract me. However, I still allow notifications for GroupMe, G-Mail, and Snapchat because they are a means of communication with my close friends or they send work notifications. This week I started paying closer attention to how I responded to these notifications, and I noticed that I am immediately compelled to open an email, group chat, or Snapchat notification as soon as it is received on my phone. Just having 1 or 2 unread messages can sometimes be too many unread messages for me. I decided to practice waiting to clear the notification, and it actually stressed me out to leave the red circle notifications uncleared on my home screen. This feeling persisted even if I knew that the unread message was unimportant. The discomfort with the unknown of an unread message is particularly bad with Snapchat because with no message preview I automatically have the mindset that every incoming message could be important. In contrast, I noticed that I do not check Instagram or Facebook frequently because there is no notification urging me to check the app and clear it.