Everyone knows Penn prefers Scrabble to Minesweeper scores, but will accept FreeCell if you play with at least two colors.
It’s like TwitPenn, but with weird people on Facebook! Thanks to the help of Openbook, we can see what people are saying about our school in their statuses. Totally creepy, but totally fun.
While most this week were full of graduation plans, we did manage to find a few gems amongst the proud parents on Philly pilgrimages. Check ‘em after the jump!
We were alerted this morning to a post on New York party/photo blog Guest of a Guest, a post which carries the title “UPenn’s Drunken Festival Relieves Students’ Stress.” Drawing pictures from a Fling Facebook album or two, Guest of a Guest mocks the weekend’s antics in the Quad and around campus. All in all, it’s pretty innocuous, save for one photo with a beer bottle and some dude’s head up a chick’s skirt.
The post is of that “hey let’s mock college but also be nostalgic because real life sucks” variety, with its lines like, “If only we could stay in college forever…oh the sloppy mistakes we’d still be making.” Anyway, we got to wondering how the post’s author, Liz Jeneault, ended up in Penn Facebook albums–and who exactly she was. A simple tap o’ the Google informed us of Liz’s identity, as a freshman at NYU. According to Ms. Jeneault’s LinkedIn, she’s a freshman Journalism major who “would ideally like to have an internship every semester, for the rest of my college career” and is interested in “new-age media.” We are all down with ambition, but cool it with the pangs of college nostalgia until you’ve graduated.
With grades supposedly coming out today eventually, some of you might be switching from “really interesting” Spring classes to some in the 1.0 difficulty range. If your schedule needs tweaking, never fear; Penn freshmen are here!
Last semester, the Facebook group (founded by none other than Juiciest Face herself) “UPenn Frosh Schedules That Need Tweaking!” sprung up so the class of 2013 could, ideally, trade spots in hard-to-get classes. While there seemed to be a lot on the discussion board during Add/Drop, the success rate is unclear. Will this group will come back to life for spring classes? We’re not sure, but we did learn some important things from fall after the jump.
Did you all see how, on Facebook, our school is now called Penn? It’s not everywhere – it still says “UPenn” under Education – but it does seem to indicate a shift away from the school being known as “UPenn” in the cyber world.
Maybe they named the website “upenn.edu” under the assumption the whole internet thing wouldn’t take off. Like, whatever intern the school assigned to pick out the url figured everyone else in the world had the same VHS collection of cute cat tapes that he did, so why would anyone feel the need to spend any time online? UPenn, Penn, Penn State – doesn’t matter, no one’s going to look at it anyway. A fair opinion at the time.
But the internet became huge, the nickname stuck, and the school hates it. There are no official references made to the school using “UPenn,” the name isn’t on apparel, and it’s not anywhere on the website other than the url bar. It’s unclear whether they pushed for this Facebook change or if this was a Zuckerberg-driven decision, but the shift back to just Penn is clearly in place.
Plus, www.penn.edu totally takes you to the school’s website, so let’s just change the email addresses to @penn.edu and be done with it. Actually, let’s be done with it as soon as we’re all out of school – it would be such a pain to have to tell everyone our email address changed.
Remember the Facebook guy?
As NSO rapidly approaches (three weeks, kids), we at UTB have taken it upon ourselves to mine the depths of Facebook and see how we can keep ourselves occupied until then. Thankfully, we have come across a few gems. Enjoy.
Event: CYA Goes Speed Dating with Harvard, UPenn, Berkeley and MIT!
Location: San Francisco
The What: “This speed dating event offers the best: brief meetings followed by an open mixer with Ivy Plus grads in your age range. Best of all, you never have to ask for a phone number or an email address. Just log on to the Right Stuff’s secure speed dating web site afterwards and start exchanging messages.”
The Realz: Stanford alums plan mixer with nerds and state schoolers.
UTB Says: As if speed dating (or networking) wasn’t awkward enough, let’s throw some MIT kids in the mix and have a “cash bar with non-alcoholic beverages.” So… no.
This one, by Brynn Shepherd:
You’ll have a chance to see more of Brynn’s work later this week as part of our Penn survival series.
Typically, we find all Facebook applications to be fairly stupid/ridiculous. Fortunately, this one fits the mold.
This highly scientific quiz allows you finally answer that burning question: should you really have gone to Penn?
After taking the survey, we wound up with Yale…Blair Waldorf would be green with envy.
Yeah, everyone’s talking about it. Facebook is obsessed with Twitter.
Exhibit A: Facebook’s new “Stream.”
v.
Face it: You go to Penn, which means that there must be a little geek living somewhere deep down inside you. Well, today’s the day to let that little geek have a field day: Nerds all over are celebrating 3/3/09 – if it’s been a while since you took Math 103, that’s 3 x 3 = 09, so that the square root of the year is equal to the days of the month and week. This only happens nine times a century, so it’s kind of a big deal.
According to the AP, a high school teacher from California was so excited that he created a contest for whomever had the biggest Square Root Day bash. The prize is a splendid $339.
“”These days are like calendar comets, you wait and wait and wait for them, then they brighten up your day — and poof — they’re gone,” he said. Looks like someone’s excited!
If you’re looking for square inspiration, there’s an entire Facebook group dedicated to the celebration of these rare occasions, which even includes a thread about what dedicated fans are planning to do, from “Asking my massage therapist to use square strokes” to “Carving a square root in a mathematician’s chest with a buck knife.”
Happy squaring! Go get your root on. And screw midterms, feel free “celebrate with three shots of triple sec at 9:33pm,” as one Facebook enthusiast suggested.
If the birth of Food Friendzy ignited the spark, Campusfood.com’s love of Facebook is now further manifested through this fun little addition to its order confirmation page. (Incidental disclaimer: It was snowy. We were desperate.)
Since waiting an hour for shitty food isn’t quite pathetic enough, you can now inform the entire Facebook world of both your embarrassing choices of grub and your absurd laziness with just the click of a mouse. Thanks for your forward thinking, c-food!
A vision of the not-so-distant future
Turns out the internet isn’t a series of tubes at all: it’s a nation.
If you check your Facebook right now (if you haven’t already), the good ol’ folks at everyone’s favorite social networking site released the following statement, probably in response to the overwhelmingly negative response to attempted policy changes that tried to steal our souls.
Today we announced new opportunities for users to play a meaningful role in determining the policies governing our site. We released the first proposals subject to these procedures –- The Facebook Principles, a set of values that will guide the development of the service, and Statement of Rights and Responsibilities that governs Facebook’s operations. Users will have the opportunity to review, comment and vote on these documents over the coming weeks and, if they are approved, other future policy changes. We’ve posted the documents in separate groups and invite you to offer comments and suggestions. For more information and links to the two groups, check out the Facebook Blog.
The latest plague of Memes That Need To Die is currently sweeping Facebook: posting a picture of a bunch of cartoon characters and tagging your friends in the image, yearbook superlative style. Click the image at right for a full-size view. The drama queen! The one with the bad memory! Ha ha ha, we can hardly stand the hilarity of it all! Or, wait, yes we can. Now can we please halt the proliferation of this poor-quality jpeg?
By the way, if anyone is wondering, the cartoons originally come from a British TV show called Mr. Men. (Little Miss Sunshine is the most famous one.)
Editor’s note: we’ve also seen Smurfs and other variations. Barf.
February is shaping up to be a rough month for Facebook. First, we learned that the use of our beloved social networking site leads to Prozac, then our parents ruined our favorite procrastination technique, and don’t forget that whole debacle about how Facebook tried to own us for a while (by the way, has anyone checked out Google’s “privacy policy” lately?). So maybe it shouldn’t come as much of a surprise that in addition to its whopping list of negatives, Facebook will also probably kill us.
A new study shows that social networking might give you cancer. Apparently the increased isolation that comes with hours of stalking your friends, tagging photos, and playing online Scrabble changes your hormones and immune system functions to the point where too much Facebook can lead to dementia, heart disease, and a myriad of other health problems that make meningitis and measles pale in comparison.
So maybe it would be best to step away from our Facebooks from a while. But look at the bright side: there will be plenty of time to screw around on the Internet once you finally reach the Great Social Network in the sky.
That’s right, the Book of Faces no longer owns your soul. For now, at least.
UPDATE: A “wave of protests” from Facebook users had its desired effect: Zuckerberg and the FBook team decided not to go through with the changes in their Terms of Use. Looks like we sort of own you, Facebook. NBD.
Today Consumerist reported that Facebook has updated its terms of service with some new Big Brother-esque terminology. The rule used to be that Facebook would give up its “irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide license (with the right to sublicense)” to do whatever the ef it feels like if you terminated your account. They have amended that policy and now they own all your stuff, forevskis:
The following sections will survive any termination of your use of the Facebook Service: Prohibited Conduct, User Content, Your Privacy Practices, Gift Credits, Ownership; Proprietary Rights, Licenses, Submissions, User Disputes; Complaints, Indemnity, General Disclaimers, Limitation on Liability, Termination and Changes to the Facebook Service, Arbitration, Governing Law; Venue and Jurisdiction and Other.
Zuckerberg, if we didn’t worship you, we might hate you.
