It should be safe to say college is a time in your life to get to know the opposite sex better — there are plenty of ways to meet new people, and a lot of flirting going on.
But what if you’re too shy to tell the girl in Dickinson Community that you like her newly-dyed red hair and it melts your heart? Or too scared to let that black-haired male in College-in-the-Woods’ Oneida Hall know you think he is the perfect shade of caramel?
Like a Little is a flirting facilitator for those not brave enough to say what they want to say. The website describes its purpose as a way “to allow you to compliment and chat about your crushes around you or otherwise bemoan your missed encounters from the safety of your trusty screen.”
The website was created in late October at Stanford University by Evan Reas, and serves more than 120 campuses.
Binghamton University has its own chapter that was founded by Kaitlyn A. Vatter. Though it started only two weeks ago, it currently has nearly 50 posts.
BU students have spotted cuties all over, from State Street to the dining halls and even the Glenn G. Bartle Library.
Reas and his friends, the “Like a Littlers,” claim to have made the website after “90 cumulative years of frustrated flirtation, 42 cups of coffee and 12 hours of hardcore development.”
According to Reas, he thought of the idea when “[he] and two co-founders had been working on start-ups for the past few months and had a huge interest in location, mobile and real-time and saw a couple of individual sites doing location-based communication and microflirting.”
To use the website you select a gender, pick a hair color, type in the location of the person and leave your flirty comment in the box. And there you have it — with four easy steps, you’re on your way to getting your flirt on.
In addition to posting on the website, users can also comment on posts already made. Since Like a Little is entirely anonymous, your name shows up as a fruit name for that thread when you comment on a post.
Ruben Martinez, a sophomore majoring in English, is one of the few who have heard about Like a Little at BU and is skeptical.
“The site itself reminds me of the ‘missed encounters’ on Craigslist, except just for a college campus,” Martinez said. “It’s a decent idea, but I don’t think it’ll ever really catch on until there is a way to connect with the person you mean to compliment, because otherwise you’re complimenting for no real reason.”
Reas begs to differ. He thinks it is possible for this website to help people form relationships and is a total romantic.
“We have heard of hundreds of cases of people who have gotten together through the site,” Reas said. “Most often, they leave a descriptive flirt, then the person they mentioned private messages them and they chat from there. I’d just urge everyone to give it an honest try — there’s no downside and nobody knows it is you.”
The website can be found at http://www.likealittle.com/binghamton.