For those of you who haven’t heard about Lulu, it’s an app that lets girls rate guys. It’s advertised as ”the first database of men, built by women, for women.” The app is only accessible to girls with Facebook accounts and claims to be “as private as you want it to be.”  The app also has a counterpart for males, allowing them to see the general feedback they have received, in addition to receiving”tips and insights about the mysterious world of women.”

Let’s run down our opinions on it, shall we?

Charlotte:

According to Cosmopolitan, Lulu is is the lovechild of Sex and the City and Facebook. I am not so sure. Why? Because Sex and the City rocks and this app kind of sucks. Upon initially hearing about Lulu, on a scale of one-to-puke, I wanted run to the toilet and clutch my stomach for dear life. After cruising for a solid three hours twenty minutes, I realized, however, that this app has major trolling potential. I am going to share exactly how this app grinds my gears, but also why it’s mildly hilarious.

Prepare yourselves because I’m about to go all Upton Sinclair in the The Jungle‘s meatpacking district.

99 Problems and they’re all about Lulu– There are definitely some serious problems with Lulu. For example, the app is painfully hetereonormative (…can I graduate now?). Ignoring Lulu’s other problems, simply look at the fact that it only allows girls to access the app to only rate guys. A massive red flag should be going up right about now. We live in world where plenty of people don’t adhere the Lulu norm, but ladies, its all okay in the end because “Lulu gives [you] the power to be Taylor Swift,” according to its blog: “Enough said.”

Hold up… I’m sorry, what?

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It’s an almost universally agreed upon fact that Facebook changes suck. We like our social networks reliable and unmodified, gosh darnit! So when the cover photo was introduced, we were naturally all a bit hesitant.  Two profile pictures? We initially thought to ourselves. What is this hootenanny?

But Facebook users are narcissistic embraced the cover photo and utilized it as a form of expression, posting awkwardly-sized, rectangular images of everything from their favorite place to their favorite artist.  After some thorough Facebook stalking research, we deduced what each type of cover photo says about you:

The Beyonce: We feel your pain. Other Beyonce fans are tough to find; you’ve got to broadcast your obsession in the off chance you’ll get a couple of likes from some fellow Bey enthusiasts hiding out there somewhere. But seriously, this ubiquitous choice isn’t all that bad. You’ve got good taste in music… and humans. Sadly, you don’t win any creativity points.

The nature scene: “This website is pretty nice I guess,” Zuckerberg worried to himself the night he conceived the cover photo, “but it needs more sweet pics of people standing in front of mountains.” The nature cover photo became an instant staple. Today, you can’t stalk for long without coming across a picture of dirty people standing in front of a lake. For the most part, these send the right kinds of messages. You’ve got an adventurous side, you’ve seen some incredible sights and you know how to take a decent picture. Unless you pulled it off of Google. That’s not okay. [Read more →]

This semester, I told myself I would go out of my way to make new friends and find a housing group get to know the community better. Sure, my Facebook indicates I have over 100 friends that attend Brown, but how many do I actually hang out with on even a semi-regular basis? As a self-proclaimed social networking guru, I would spend endless hours gazing at photos of all the people I knew at Brown and tell myself that I should really consider hanging out with them more. The problem was that I wasn’t sure how to.

Enter Lent: a time of giving up something for six weeks until the day before Easter. The purpose of Lent is to prepare for the Easter season, but I decided to expand upon that and make it a starting point for establishing a more personal, more active social life. Okay, so maybe it wasn’t the best deadline idea, but regardless, I figured I’d at least have made an effort to get to know more people by then. On February 13, I went against my procrastinating lifestyle and decided to cut myself off from Facebook and Twitter.

Contrary to popular belief, it’s not total social suicide to leave the social networking world. I mean, I’m still allowing myself to stay on Tumblr and Instagram. But I told myself it would be more rewarding to see people in person rather than on my computer. As of now, I’ve been off of Twitter and Facebook for a month, and I feel as though I’ve definitely made an improvement! Thus, I’ve made a list of benefits of doing the Facebook/Twitter detox with personal anecdotes to help motivate you to do the same. Check it out after the jump.

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Everyone knows the internet is a scary place where it becomes frighteningly easy to do slightly awkward things, like when you “Like” a mupload of someone you’ve never spoken to (stupid Facebook for iPhone), or Reply All when you REALLY did not want to.

To accidentally link the @BrownUAdmission Twitter to your private Facebook account is kind-of on another level.

Yes, it seems that someone working for our Admissions office—hopefully in an attempt to link the Admissions Twitter with the Admissions Facebook page—somehow managed to send all his/her private status updates as tweets to Brown alumni, students, and whoever else follows @BrownUAdmission.

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So we’re changing some stuff up.

Since we started back in 2009, the “Time-waster of the day” and “Free food digest” columns have been daily staples on the site. We share the time-wasters with all of you as a means of giving you entertaining breaks from your studies, and we provide a roundup of free food around campus to further enable your collective Nice Slice/Kabob and Curry/Meeting Street Cookies addictions and give you a well-deserved break from the tedium of meal plan.

We love these columns, but our staff has recently decided to stop publishing them on our site. Instead, we will continue to publish both columns daily on our Facebook page! Don’t worry: you’ll still be able to eat free (or dine trying) and waste time.

We feel that this will a) allow both columns to better serve their intended purposes for members of the Brown community, and b) make the feed on our site less cluttered. If you’re a fan of either (or both!) of these columns and would still like to make them part of your daily reading routine, we would encourage you to “like” our page. Additionally, if you’re interested in the occasional polar bear pic among other relevant links, you should hit up the page more often.

We really think this will be great and we can’t wait for the next steps. Raise your free Kabob and Curry and let’s make a toast: Here’s to wasted time, free food and a happy and healthy spring. Cheers.

Every year, sometime in mid-April, nearly 3,000 students log on with nervous excitement and sign off in shock and horror. The Brown Admitted Student Facebook group is a right of passage for prospective College Hill-dwellers, a frightening but ultimately misleading first glimpse at your classmates. These groups are, for the first few months, home to excruciating showmanship, awkward smalltalk, and strange requests. For posterity and humor’s sake, Accepted! 2017 has collected some of the funniest and most cringe-worthy posts from admitted students groups across the country. Check out the submissions culled from Brown’s Class of 2017 group. Some of these might look familiar…

Many of you have heard about Facebook’s new Graph Search function. Some of you might even be part of the select few who are getting to Beta-test the thing. Now, we could debate for hours whether or not Graph Search is preposterously creepy or actually useful, but I think most of us have already realized its comic potential. So has this Tumblr called “Actual Facebook Graph Searches.” Most searches are just combinations of diametrically opposed traits, such as “Mothers of Jews who like bacon” and “People who like Focus on the Family and Neil Patrick Harris,” but I guess some people might find the search for “Single Women who live nearby and who are interested in men and like Getting Drunk!” pretty useful. You might have to start purging your Facebook likes like you purge your friends.

Image via. 

Try to think back to your middle school years. Among the several airbrushed sweatshirts, Black Eyed Peas hits, and rounds on rounds of Icy Tower, there was was the all-knowing and infallible Love Calculator that would help you determine the likelihood that you and your crush (<3) would end up ~together 4ever.~ You’d type in your name and that of your “dream partner” and the website would hurl a random percentage right back at your face; yet you were unsatisfied that despite your 3 8 17 entries that day, your crush would never be informed of your feelings for him/her.

Fast-forward to 2013: Facebook is probably the center of your (online) universe, and your cupid-like peers have drastically changed the love game. Enter “Brown Admirers,” a Facebook page through which you can submit a light-hearted message to a crush or individual you’ve been admiring from afar in the form of a Google Doc. The page’s administrators then post your submission on its timeline and tag the person to whom the message was directed. You can submit the message anonymously or with your name, or you can even include little clues to help them determine who the sender is. In other words, your crush will definitely get the message but the extent to which you reveal yourself to him/her is completely in your hands.  [Read more →]

Candidates, representatives, proposition oh my! Last night was full of stress and tension, but one issue loomed in all Brunonians’ minds: “What’s my witty election status going to be?”

Come on, admit it: Gloating and touting your political savvy is the real benefit of voting (psh, who cares about civic duty?). Here’s some of campus’s best (or worst):

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It was around 1 p.m. on Tuesday when the news sunk in. I had just peacefully awoken to a room awash with cool sunlight. Class was cancelled, the libraries were closed, and the cafeterias were open; it was undoubtedly a simpler time. Without a trace of the urgency that characterizes a typical day at Brown, I eventually drifted over to my computer to see what had transpired during my indulgent sleep. What I found was truly shocking. My newsfeed was alight with stunned reports and fervent commentary.  Many had foreseen a simplified version of what had transpired, but no one could have predicted the extent of the consequences.  Some of the more impassioned outbursts:

Portions of the East Coast remained effectively underwater, but these outspoken friends were aghast at another piece of news: The announcement of Star Wars Episode VII. [Read more →]