In A Sea Of Smartphones, Going Off The Grid

When Brittany Siler wants to figure out her Friday plans, she doesn’t log onto Facebook to check which events she signed up for that week. She doesn’t look at her Twitter stream to see what events are trending. She doesn’t pull up Foursquare to learn about the hottest restaurants her friends have been checking into.

Brittany does not, cannot, do any of these, because she does not have accounts on those sites. She doesn’t have an account on any website, in fact, besides Gmail and a Google Plus account — where her only friend is her sister, who posts pictures of her children. Nor does she have a smartphone, opting instead to carry “a little Nokia that was made before common cellphones could access the internet.”

That Siler lives without these “always-on” technologies wouldn’t be particularly strange — millions of Americans live without smartphones, Facebook, or even (gasp) high-speed Internet — were she not a student at NYU, where it seems that every elevator is packed with students on their smartphones, the last time anyone got invited to a party over anything but Facebook was back in high school, and through its various digital initiatives, the university embraces technology with open arms.

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How To Survive At NYU Using The NYU-Specific Facebook Pages

We’re living in the renaissance of NYU-specific Facebook pages: A golden age for anonymous confessions, cute compliments, and questionable dating profiles. In the past few months, pages like NYU Secrets and NYU Hookups have drawn massive attention across campus, and have inspired countless other NYU-related pages. Here’s our definitive guide on how to survive using NYU’s Facebook network. (It will cease being a definitive guide next week, when approximately 400 new pages will be born.)

If you’re looking to get laid:

Hoping to hit it off with a friendly stranger? Try browsing NYU Hook Ups’ for the anonymous partner of your dreams. Over 360 users have uploaded their bios—without names or faces—to the page. Make contact with one of these anons and see where it goes; may the odds be ever in your favor. Read more…


What Does Your Profile Picture Say About You?

A profile picture is like the introductory line to an essay about you. It needs to draw the viewer in, intriguing them just enough to click on the little box. On Facebook, profile pictures range from the studio-professional “senior portrait” to the more artistic “I-swear-there’s-a-reason-why-a-cat’s-head-has-been-superimposed-on-my-body” photos. But whether you want to show off your “frat bros” to your friends, or would rather opt for a new picture only when “Pokémon Profile Picture month” rolls around, you make a choice when you click “edit profile picture.”

To find out how NYU students choose their profiles on various social media websites and dating apps, we turned on Facebook chat and started questioning. Read more…


Facebook Will Buy You Lunch Or Else A Non-Profit Is Getting $20 Million

If you have you gotten an email from legalnotice@facebookmail.com saying that you may be eligible to cash in on a settlement, there is good news — it is real. Unlike the Nigerian prince email scams we have gotten accustomed to, the awkward legal jargon in the email is actually pretty legit.

Plaintiffs in a class-action lawsuit claim that Facebook may have used the photos and information of Facebook users for ‘sponsored stories’ in 2011. When users ‘liked’ a product or company, the user’s Facebook friends could see the ‘like’ on the company’s page, creating a sort-of endorsement or advertisement. The plaintiffs claimed that sensitive information was used without the permission of users, and that users were unable to opt-out of the feature. Facebook settled the suit for $20 million last December.  The plan is to give $10 to every user who has a justified claim.

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A Conversation With The Creator Of NYU Secrets

In the past two weeks, Facebook page NYU Secrets has gotten over 5000 likes. The page, which posts anonymous secrets sent in by NYU students, has posted over 400 secrets since it went live. Since it seems like the page will only continue to grow in popularity over this coming semester, we sat down with the anonymous founder.

Could you tell us how the page got started?

Well, the first thing is it wasn’t my idea. I have a friend that goes to Washington Univerity in St. Louis and he said they have a moderately successful page like that. But they have a big community there, and he hears me bitching all the time about the state of this school, and he was like, “Well maybe you guys would benefit from something like that.” So I started it. I wasn’t expecting much, but I got more than I bargained for.

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Can NYU Have A Successful Facebook ‘Compliments’ Account?

The Internet of yesteryear no longer exists, or at least that’s what we’ve heard. It used to be a hostile beast that would attack the hopeful pieces of information and commentary we’d put onto it. Now, instead of beating up on us, it nurtures us.

The latest news in support of this “New Niceness” comes in the form of university “compliments” Facebook accounts, to which students submit anonymous compliments about peers, and the accounts post them for their entire schools to see. The trend began at Canada’s Queen’s University in September, and since then, roughly 80 colleges and universities across the country and abroad have established such pages.

NYU appears to have tried to create a compliments account twice — one time being more successful than the other — but neither really took off, which has us thinking: With our immensity and overall lack of community, is it possible for NYU to have a successful Facebook compliments account?

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Gramercy Green Residents Go Online And On Attack

“Arthritis doesn’t stop you from climbing one staircase.”

This was something said to my roommate, Ashley Hicks, on the Gramercy Green Facebook group on Nov. 5. Earlier that day, while taking the elevator to the sixth floor where she and I live, several other students made biting remarks and scoffed as she pressed the sixth floor button after someone had pressed “7.”

Fed up with what made the fourth time she had been harassed on the elevator, Ashley took to the Facebook group to let people know why she cannot always follow “elevator etiquette”: Ashley was diagnosed with Juvenile Arthritis several years ago, and due to occasional flare-ups, even simple tasks like taking one staircase up or down can be excruciating. What followed was a barrage of cruel comments from classmates criticizing her illness, and strangers making personal accusations about her abilities and character.

Why such a harsh response? Why is this Facebook group so argumentative? Can it be dismissed as a casualty of the Internet, or is it something more? How does NYU respond to this, and how can we stop this from spreading and continuing to interfere with a pleasant college experience? NYU Local digs deeper into the Gramercy Facebook group to better understand this cyber community’s impact on our real world university. Read more…


If You Endorse Romney On Facebook, People Will Actually Unfriend You

If you’re on Facebook today, you’re probably getting crushed under the weight of Election Madness. Your friends have gone gung-ho political, and it’s getting pretty damn insufferable. Some of them even write statuses like, “please unfriend me if you’re voting for Mitt Romney.”

That’s a heck of a thing to say to your friends. It implies a certain all-or-nothing attitude that comes with living in a bubble. It’s kinda crazy! But who would follow through with it? I decided to find out.

On Sunday, I posted the following on Facebook:

“I’ve decided that I’m endorsing Mitt Romney this year. The deficit is the single most important issue of our generation—I’m phenomenally distressed by the dismissal many people I know show toward it. Romney isn’t a perfect candidate, and the Republicans definitely aren’t the ideal party at the moment. But there’s no excuse to sanctimoniously ignore reality for the sake of pretty ideals. I don’t have time for it, and frankly neither does this country.” Read more…


Facebook Wants Your Organs (For People Who Need Them)

Because knowing literally everything about us apparently wasn’t enough, Mark Zuckerberg is now after our insides.

In a move that’s pretty unprecedented but also awesome, Facebook announced Tuesday that users will now be able to list their donor-status on their timelines, effectively transforming the social network into a localized database of potential lifesavers. Additionally, the site is encouraging users to register as donors by facilitating the online registration process at the state level.

The feature has already proven its worth, and then some – Donate Life America reported 6,000 new registrations as of Tuesday night (a 1300% increase in average daily enrollment), and 100,000 people listed their donor status on their pages. Though many will doubt the motivations for the announcement – Facebook is due to go public any day now, and the feature is certainly a PR wet dream – the undeniably positive and galvanizing effect resulting from Zuckerberg’s announcement reinforces the hope that social media can be about more than just sharing schwasty pics with one another. Read more…


Facebook Battles Nosy Employers

From news about its IPO to a potential lawsuit with Yahoo, it seems that since Facebook has decided to go public, the company has had even more of a presence in the media. Late last week, the company threatened to take legal action against employers who asked for the Facebook passwords of employees and potential job candidates. Now that Facebook has customized its privacy settings to the point where you can control exactly what each one of your friends can see on your profile, when employers try to stalk your public page there usually isn’t much for them to see.

So, some have started to ask for potential hires’ passwords in order to “get to know you better.” In fact, almost 95% of employers who use social media to find out more about potential job candidates want to see more than just your public profile. Read more…