Every week, I write College Candy’s “Weekly Ten” about whatever the hard-hitting, relevant issues of the week are.

Obviously.

This week, I’ve decided to focus my Weekly Ten on my Top 10 Facebook Pet Peeves. Because it doesn’t get more relevant or hard-hitting than that.

10. Status updates all the time.
Seriously? Facebook (even though they’re trying really hard to be) is NOT Twitter. Get that shiz outta my news feed. You’re clogging it up.

9. Constant profile picture changes.
Okay, so I might be a little guilty of this one. However, when you’re changing your profile picture more than your underwear (people like that exist, I know it…), it’s time to reevaluate your life.

Special Mention: Annoying peace-sign-and-pouty-lips profile picture. Doubly worse if the picture is taken with MacBook’s photo booth. Triply worse if you’re wearing giant sunglasses. If there’s a small dog or a Coach bag in the picture? Do everyone a favor and just delete your whole profile. Read More »

The iPhone is awesome, hands down.  If you have it, you’re addicted and constantly using it for either an amusing application, Google maps, texting, or, you know, just a phone call.  If you don’t have one, you want one (like me!). Badly.

Even with all the apps already available, most notably the ones that make you fat, there are still things that we wish the iPhone could do for us.  Like laundry.  Or take the garbage out.  Too bad Apple hasn’t come out with some sort of external thumb feature…

But we don’t need an iThumb for some of the apps we have in mind. Things that every college student needs and aren’t currently available in the App Store. You know, like:

Text Breathalyzer – Everyone knows that texting while drunk leads to an extremely awkward morning after.  When you’re hung over, getting hit with the realization that you sent something along the lines of  “i kjus tluv u n i wan t be foreverrrrr” to your douchy ex-boyfriend (that may or may not be an exact copy of an actual text…don’t judge me) just makes things worse.  Well, worry no more with the Text Breathalyzer!  You just blow into the breathalyzer attachment and if you’re over the limit, the iPhone will lock down the text feature (or, if you choose, only let you text certain people).  Problem solved! Read More »

[Life isn’t black and white. As much as we wish we simply loved or hated things, there is often that whole annoying gray area in the middle. Like, we hate how Walmart treats its employees…but we love the low prices! Or, we love how that boy makes us laugh….but we hate that he has no motivation in life. Damn you, gray area; you make decision-making that much more complicated!

There are so many difficult choices in life (do we love or hate high heels??), so we thought we’d sort through ‘em right here. Every week we will discuss another issue we are torn up about. Let us know your thoughts in the comments section!]

Ohh FB. I really do hate how much I love you.

Love: Clearly, Facebook serves its purpose as a social networking site. It’s great for ‘friending’ (and poking!) that cute guy you see around campus but don’t actually know, checking up on your friends from high school and leaving them funny video posts on their walls, and helping you to remember your lab partner’s birthday. Facebook makes it extremely easy to communicate with people without actually talking to anyone or putting in any real effort. Read More »

[It's the first full week of December, and while the rest of the world gears up for The Most Wonderful Time of the Year, I still need to take a break from the constant holiday cheer. The following is this week’s Pissed List, so if you’ve got to vent, too, just holla atcha girl!]

1. The Full House Remake

You weren’t a child of the ’90s unless you watched “Full House” (and if you didn’t, you seriously missed out on some major TGIF action). You knew the Tanner family. You still catch reruns when you stumble upon them flipping through the channels. You pause, you catch a Kimmy Gibbler cameo and laugh, and you remember how things were. And that’s how it should be. Now that John “Uncle Jesse” Stamos is proposing a Full House remake show, all our classic memories may be tainted. Seeing the aged DJ and Steph and the rest of the gang is just going to make me feel like an old fart. And the next thing you know, people are going to start making covers of good ’90s songs, and I’m going to start thinking to myself, “the original ‘Quit Playin Games With My Heart’ was so much better,” and then I will have turned into my mother, and this can’t happen during my 20s.

2. The Obama Citizenship Scandal

I don’t quite follow why this is happening (for all practical purposes, the presidential transition is already underway, and the last thing this country needs is more divisive action), but someone is suing Barack Obama, disputing his US citizenship and thus his claim to the presidency. For the record, Obama was born on August 4, 1961 in Hawaii, which became a member of the Union in 1959. Now what’s the problem? (And let’s not forget that former-rival John McCain was born in Panama on US-zoned territory). Read More »

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 »