Remember your senior year of high school? Touring colleges, trying not to get your hopes up. Retaking the SAT for the tenth time, wondering if you’d get a better score with the ACT. The love/hate relationship with collegeboard.com, and endless trips to the college counselor.

Then, THE WAIT. And running to the mail box every day. Staring at your application status page - pressing F5 over and over (refresh, refresh, refresh!). Until, one day that magical word appears: admitted.

Fast forward to September.
The move-in is over (your mom only broke down once, thank goodness). The awkward, “Hi, I’m going to be living in close quarters!” moment is over with your roomie(s) and classes have begun.

And an unsettling feeling set in. This place isn’t what you thought it would be. You try to love it - really you do - but it isn’t the right fit and you can’t seem to get into a groove. You know you could transfer but *argh!* you thought you were set! That the application insanity was done for good! What do you do? Read More »

So, I was out at the bar with some coworkers last week, and a guy started talking about “The New Facebook.”

“There’s a ‘new’ Facebook?” I asked.

“Yeah,” he replied. “Is it bad that I want to go home right now just to try it out?”

“Definitely,” I responded. “Stay here and get drunk. New Facebook will be waiting when the bar closes.”

Facebook has had quite the impact on American pop culture. I mean, really? This guy wanted to leave the bar to try it!? Whenever there’s even a minimal change in the layout and operation of the social network, it causes an uproar.

Remember when mini-feed first popped up? Immediately, groups sprouted all over the internet:
“Down with Mini-Feed!”
“Boycott F/B if They Don’t Get Rid of Mini-Feed Immediately!”
“Facebook Makes Stalking Easier with Mini-Feed!”

You get the point. Of course, now we’re all used to the program, and many of us keep updated via mini-feed every day: “Hey, I saw on Mini-Feed that you got a new job, congratulations!”

So, even though I’m hesitant to add too many applications (I don’t like that we have to check a box giving the ‘application’ full access to the info in our profiles), and even though I’m fully content keeping tabs on my friends the “old way,” I decided to check out the hullabaloo that is The New Facebook. Read More »

I write the following with the understanding that no matter how annoying Facebook can be, it will never be more annoying than Myspace. (Editor’s Note: I am not so sure…) And I will not stop using Facebook because of these things.

10. People You May Know. Otherwise known as “People that you don’t know well enough to be friends with”, “People who have rejected your friend request”, or “People you hate and would never friend even if their lives somehow depended on you friending them.” Facebook has been around long enough that if you haven’t found your friend yet, and he or she hasn’t found you, then you probably aren’t very good friends to begin with.

9. The Mini-Feed. Because you need constant reminder of the things you’ve recently done or said. Or applications you’ve added. Or songs you’ve listened to. Or things you’ve edited. The mini feed takes up like ¼ of your page (unless you are a dirty application whore: see below) and when you try to delete things, it keeps adding other things from days and weeks ago.

8. The Education and Work box. I say this is annoying, but it’s honestly the first thing I look at on someone else’s page. I do it because I am a masochist and I like to hurt myself by seeing how well these people that I hardly know are doing in places that I would love to move to. Read More »

There’s no question about it: finding somebody to pay you is hard. In some cases, it’s even hard to find somebody to not pay you but instead give you something that’s supposed to be equivalent: college credit, for instance, or a big-ticket line on your resume.

Yeah, I’m talking about the Real World.

I’m far from a career counselor, but I have picked up a lot of helpful tips along the way. Since it’s sometimes hard to know where to start when looking for a job or internship, let me offer a few things that I know to be helpful:

• Work those connections. Connections, connections, connections. Have I made my point clear yet? CONNECTIONS! If you know somebody whose friend knows somebody whose brother knows somebody… well, what are you waiting for?! There’s only two degrees of separation between you and that person, and nobody else is going to do the legwork for you. It’s an unfortunate fact of life that a ton of industries are based on connections, and at some places it can be impossible to get your foot in the door unless you physically plant it there. Talk to people, ask questions, and be proactive. Networking is far more important than you think. Read More »

I owe Mark Zuckerberg a thank-you note for the many hours of procrastination and ability to do brief background-checks on guys my friends or I have dated, but my love for the Facebook pales in comparison to my adoration of the best application ever.

I admit, I was what a communications professor would have categorized as a “laggard” of technology users (See? You use these random bits from class sometimes!), and I absolutely, passionately, vehemently loathed the applications on Facebook. A good friend of mine went so far as to title the profiles with superwalls, superpokes, the ability to throw sheep at people and start zombie fights as “MySpaced out profiles,” and we would roll our eyes together at how lame our generation had become. Was it not enough that we had integrated Facebook into our daily lives, making it a verb and using it to evaluate our acquaintances and friends alike? Lame, indeed, twenty-somethings. And so I was a staunch hater of all things that were not on the original Facebook.

That is, until I discovered Scrabulous. Read More »

Remember when Facebook was the simple, straightforward, selective version of MySpace? When it was “the facebook”? All we had was a profile, a wall, poking, messaging, and groups. There was no photo feature, so we had to agonize over that one, single, perfect profile picture. No status updates, no events, no high school students.

As Facebook gradually became bigger, more complicated, more cluttered, and more creepy, we complained, but after the initial outcry, we always acquiesced and eventually embraced the new developments. Newsfeed threatened to tear us apart, but as always, we broke down and accepted it. And then came the greatest betrayal, when Facebook opened its once closely guarded gates and welcomed in anyone, anyone at all.

If anything could drive me away from Facebook forever, it would be the über-sketch appearance of members with the words “(no network)” appearing ominously after their names. And yet, we tolerate even this.

Somehow, the latest Facebook phenomenon still managed to take me by surprise. I’m referring, of course, to the applications. After years of slowly but surely adopting one gimmicky, gratuitous feature after another, Facebook decides to let us create our own, and in doing so, flood profiles with clutter. Well I hate it. Read More »