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In This Issue

• Lessons of a Dancer’s Life
• Fast Times at Our Lady of Mercy Elementary
• Gulati Talks Soccer, Economics, and His Evil Alter Ego Zubil Dubabi
• Bleeding Candy Sweethearts
• 79 Ways To Fix Your Iraq
• 10-Year-Old Reviews IMDb’s Top Ten Movies of All Time
• A Good London Drinker Thinks How to Drink Hers
• Tales of the Inexpressible: Kinematics
• Cupid as a Young Teen
• Unadvised, Advising the Unadvisable
• Tales of the Inexpressible: Bless Your Heart
• On the Web, No One Knows You’re a Scientist
• Go Ask Alice!
• The Big News from the Big Town: Hollywood!
• The BWOG
• Bored at Butler
• THEY Watch

At some point during your time at Columbia, you will meet your soulmate. You can have all the intellectual discussions and naked parties you want, but meeting "The One" is pretty much the most important thing you will do here. If you're a senior and you haven't found him or her yet... well, it looks like you're running out of time and you're probably going to die alone. Sorry! The enlightened among us know that there's really only one place to look for love in today's world: online directories. But just what kind of success rate can you expect on these websites? For your benefit, The Fed recently created a fictional character and charted her success at finding love on two of the most popular social networking sites, Facebook and MySpace.

Meet "Kelsie."

She hails from Syosset, Long Island. A sophomore transfer from Wellesley College, she's a single girl trying to make friends here at Columbia. She's looking for friendship, dating, a relationship, random play, or whatever she can get.  Her favorite bands are Dave Matthews Band, John Mayer, Jack Johnson, Maroon 5, Guster, and OAR.  She enjoys romantic movies (The Notebook, How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days, Armageddon) and Sex and the City.  Not much of a reader, she mentions only the Harry Potter series as her favorite books.  Her favorite quote is from Moulin Rouge: "The only thing you'll ever learn is to love and be loved in return." In addition to a seductive profile picture on each site, she has an album with shots of various provocative poses. The "About Me" section of her Facebook profile reads, "Love life, love parties and all that good stuff. Be my friend, Columbia! K." In her MySpace profile, "dat hottie kelsie" adorns the brightly colored page with glittering graphics that say she is a "Playboy Cutie" and loves marijuana. Here is how she performed.

Facebook

The "befriending a stranger" test.  Although we befriended both girls and guys to avoid suspicion, we charted the responses from various single guys to her prompts. Eighty-two percent of Columbia males confirmed the friend request from this mysterious stranger, although 32 percent of them sent messages beforehand asking who this person was. Most befriended her before we messaged back with "Lolz! I'm just new here!," however. As her popularity on Facebook grew, two Columbia males befriended this hottie, clearly based on her sparkling personality, though another two also defriended her after approximately a week.

The poke test. With regard to the poke, Mark Zuckerberg claims he simply wanted to make a feature which had no function in particular, but others are convinced of its sexual implications. Whatever the poke's true nature, only 41 percent of Columbia males reciprocated Kelsie's. Interestingly, although the majority of Columbians who poked Kelsie were single, we also received several from males in relationships.

The hottie truck. For the next test, we posted the following on the walls of all who reciprocated our poke:

You've been hit by the

|^^^^^^^^^^^^^^| ||

|...HOTTIE TRUCK......| ||'|";,___.

|_..._..._______===|=||_|__|...,] -

"(@)'(@)"""''"**|(@)(@)*****''(@)

YOU HAVE BEEN IDENTIFIED AS A CERTIFIED HOTTIE!!! ONCE YOU'VE BEEN HIT, YOU HAVE TO HIT 12 MORE HOTTIES. PASS IT ON! HIT WHO EVER YOU THINK IS HOT!

Most males let it lie stagnant, although two deleted it out of embarrassment. Another two asked Kelsie to "chill some time."

    Other tests.  Kelsie was also invited to two on-campus parties on the strength of the friend request. In addition, after a random friend request one Columbian was so bold as to ask, "have we had sex? x"

 

MySpace

For round two of the experiment, we started by adding over 60 people drawn from those who live within 10 miles of the 10027 ZIP code and members of a Columbia University group. Within six hours, Kelsie's MySpace profile boasted an impressive 30 friends.  This was more than enough to get the ball rolling, as the next morning greeted us with overtures of "friendship" from men ranging in age from 14 to mid-40s, none of whom attended Columbia.  Whenever Kelsie was online (when we were checking the progress of the profile), guys-and only guys-would send friend requests and messages at a rate of about one every two minutes.  Sometimes, we would clear the page of requests only to find that in the time it took the page to reload, three or four had taken their place.  Only one man actually checked if he knew Kelsie. Within a week, Kelsie had received 228 friend requests, 71 comments, and over 300 messages from a friends list that was 94 percent male. Here are some highlights:

    "sweatheart u are by far the best and the most gorjus girl i have seen on my space u got THE MOST BIUTIFUL EYES AND THE SWEATEST FACE,GIRL I WOULDLOVE TO GET TO KNOW U IF IT IS POSIBEL omg I LOVE THST FACE IT IS SO SWEET"

- 21 y.o. male, Manhattan

    "damn girl u look like a candy bar! .......... let me holla girl."

- 19 y.o. male, Brooklyn

    "let'z go to party'z baby dont worry you look sexy already"

- 15 y.o. male, Georgia

    We next posted a bulletin asking for people to write Kelsie love poetry in exchange for a place on her Top 8, the first eight people on a person's MySpace friends list. After a day, she had three gems:

    "if i was on your top 8 i would ask you on a date and if i was number one ill show why love with us has begun"

- 18 y.o. male, Michigan

    "sometimes my heart beat for u ican c me and u to paris boo i won't try nor cry but i will have a fresh start for me to b in ur heart from so many wishes i sure will giv u somany kisses close my eyes i see a dove baby wat we had u can call it luv do u lik this if u do writ bac"

- 22 y.o. male, Pittsburgh

    "Roses are red/and violets are blue/FOest Gump is a good movie/and I'll be glad to watch it with you."

- 26 y.o. male, Manhattan

The closest Kelsie got to love was someone who fancied himself a sugar daddy.  Calling himself a "generous guy" he sent a message asking if Kelsie would like a "benefactor."  Feigning ignorance, we sent a message back, asking for details.  Once prodded, this stranger explained that he was looking for girls to give him oral sex twice a month at a rate of $150 per session.  Apparently, one of the girls on his friends list takes him up on the offer and gladly slurps down heaping helpings of cock for cash. We asked her about it, and she gave the guy her seal of approval. She only gets $100, but we kept our better offer a secret.

In her quest for love, the difference between Kelsie's success rate on MySpace and Facebook was fairly astonishing. Either Columbia students are not quite as randy as Ann Coulter makes them out to be or MySpace is truly the dark underbelly of social life on the web-it's fairly ridiculous what seems to pass as an acceptable way to woo a lady these days. Not only do you have greater opportunities to find "love," but you can make a quick buck doing it. It's also notable that anyone who is even suspected of having breasts and a vagina is a pig in shit on MySpace. Arguably, there was a larger selection of men there, and network exclusivity on Facebook blocks people all over the world from viewing a Columbia profile. So the good news is that you shouldn't worry much about Facebook... yet. But as the site goes from financial success to financial success, spreading its legs to more networks and locations each and every week, we ask: how long will it take for us to get pokes from a sugar daddy? God knows we have bills to pay....