Finding someone to look at your belly button is not always easy. With the help of a new meet-up Web site, Yo You Want To, however, it may be easier than students think.
The Web site, which officially opened to the public in October, facilitates spontaneous offline meet-ups for students. Users need to register at columbia.yoyouwantto.com with a Columbia e-mail address to begin posting and responding to Columbia “yo"s, or online calls for buddies to join them in anything from concert-going, to Starbucks-drinking, to the perennial favorite, belly button-looking.
Founder Nikhil Nirmel, a 2008 graduate of University of Pennsylvania who transferred from New York University, admitted that the belly button post was “one of the first ones that we put up as a test that we just kind of left up there,” but that the simple and somewhat gimmicky design of YYWT has serious advantages for students looking to explore a city of endless entertainment.
“It gives you an opportunity to reach out to a whole bunch of people that share your interests,” Nirmel said. “There were a lot of things I wanted to do at school like, you know, going to concert or trying a new restaurant, and other people would have wanted to do that with me.”
Isaac Nyarko, CC ’13, signed up with similar motives in mind—to branch out and meet other new students with whom he could explore the area. For one, he said that he “wanted to find the popular places to eat around Columbia.” But, as some Columbians attest, social circles quickly become isolated, and finding the group to do such things with is not always an easy task.
“While we do have a campus, our real campus is Manhattan and the other boroughs,” YYWT user Alex Mendez, CC ’13, said. “This [Web site] might serve to better unite students with similar tastes who might go the entire four years without even meeting.”
And when posting, students can branch out as little or as much as they’d like—users have the option to control how many spots are available for their “yo”s, as well as limit them to residents of certain dorms and students in specific class years. Still, many discussion board-based meet-up Web sites like YYWT and its larger-scale predecessor CraigsList have historically been met with popular apprehension given the ease of deceiving people over the Internet.
“CraigsList is a little higher on the creepy scale, because it [the poster] could be anyone in New York City,” Nirmel said. “You have no idea who it is—it’s anonymous, which adds to the creepy factor.”
With YYWT, Nirmel said that students should feel comfortable attending meet-ups because “you know it’s a Columbia student, you have their e-mail and their picture—there is no anonymity cloaking you.”
Still, some precaution is necessary. “Like any service you would use to meet up with someone you don’t know, you have to use some common sense,” Nirmel said. “You might not want to meet someone in a deserted area at three in the morning.”
But the site, which also currently has operating branches at Penn, NYU, St. John’s College, the New School, and Palm Beach Community College, may still get abused in less serious ways, with people not showing up to events they post or putting up posts that are not serious.
As for fake or outlandish posts, Nirmel said that they are inevitable, and that ways to regulate them are limited, though they are working on developing a “flakiness” rating so users can be wary of users who never show up. Still, he said, anything more invasive than that defeats the purpose of the site. “I don’t want to dictate how people use it,” he said.
After all, sometimes the stranger events turn out to be the most memorable. Nirmel himself recalled spotting a “yo” for a Michelle Branch concert. “I actually went with them,” he said, “And, yeah, it was fun.”
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