These last few weeks of the semester are crucial. Not only is it finals week, but every single paper assigned at the beginning of the school year is now due. And after working two jobs, taking sixteen credits, reading a novel a week for a class and writing/co-producing a weekly radio sketch comedy show (yes, it’s a real thing), all of these major assignments must have slipped my mind.

But I don’t blame lack of time for my recent weeks in Hell. No, I blame Like A Little.

The Grand Valley Lanthorn published a story about likealittle.com last week, and since then it has become my biggest and guiltiest pleasure, beating out “Glee” and talking to people about educational reform.

Like A Little is an anonymous social flirtation site that allows users to hit on other people at their university without the hassle of the person knowing that they are even being complimented.

Oh, and usernames are all randomly selected fruit and vegetable names.

For most of the week that I have been obsessing over this website. I have also been berating myself, wondering what possible merit I could see in this. It seems juvenile and petty with a side order of poor grammar. But I finally came up with an explanation.

The comparisons to other sites are unavoidable for Like A Little, unfortunately. It has the quick post design like FMyLife or Texts From Last Night. It has the anonymity factor like Post Secret. It’s even like ChatRoulette, only with fewer odds of seeing male genitalia.

But where Like A Little breaks from the Internet norm is the sanguinity, the cheerfulness. The website offers little more than the opportunity to compliment a fellow student for looking good, but a website doing that is pretty remarkable in a society as cynical as we are.

Another thing that Like A Little does is open up communication, especially with shy introverts. Flirting can be tricky (coming from the world’s worst flirt), and it’s nice to see fellow students shed their timidity for a few sentences in attempts to reach their secret crush.

On the flip side, though, the site is also kind of creepy. Think about it: it’s a website based entirely around the concept of a secret admirer, only the posts don’t yield the possibility of dusting for prints like in the good old days of paper.

And I don’t know about anyone else who keeps up with the site as religiously as I have, but another criticism I have is the purposefully vague descriptions of people. I can’t be the only guy who gets excited at a post that matches them to a tee until the very last word. It’s even something excruciatingly specific, like “Lanthorn columnist, good sense of humor, great smile.” It takes me another two sentences to realize she’s talking about Andrew Justus!

Maybe I’ll just stick to FMyLife…

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