By LAJU ARENYEKA

The average person loves himself. The average person uses social media. So it suffices to say that lots of social media apps feed on the vanity on the average person. Well, that might be too extreme, but do the ‘selfie-centred’ apps flooding the app market now give cause for concern?

But before we jump the gun here, what on earth is a selfie? A selfie is a type of self-portrait photograph, typically taken with a hand-held digital camera or camera phone. Selfie apps refer to social media applications that help people share such pictures. One of such apps is instagram,  an online photo-sharing, video-sharing and social networking service that enables its users to take pictures and videos, apply digital filters to them, and share them on a variety of social networking services, such as Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr and Flickr. Although not as popular in Nigeria, over 1 billion pictures have been uploaded all over the world on instagram.

Impressive as that might seem, instagram is just the beginning of the selfie movement. Teen pop star Justin Bieber now partly owns a new social network, called ‘Shots of Me’. Unlike instagram which promotes selfies among other kinds of shots and videos, Shots of me is exclusively for selfies. It gets even better. Another app has been developed to help women find their bra sizes by simply taking a selfie of their breasts.

The app, ThirdLove uses image recognition and human voice commands to take users through the process of snapping two pictures of your breasts, one from the front and the other from the side. In just a few moments, the app processes the photos and gives the user a size number. The company has raised a $5.6 million. In  already self centred world, it does make one wonder whether social media is becoming too ‘selfie-centred.’