BRING BACK FITFINDER: Student Social Netflirting isn't dead yet

Ask most students and they’ll admit to having a library crush. Because the university library is not solely a place of serious study, but a sexually-charged hub of students subtly checking each other out over the screens of their laptops. From this mix of hormones, procrastination and high-pressure academia the FitFinder emerged.

Creation of UCL Computer Science undergrad Rich Martell, FitFinder has been described as cross between Twitter and a students’ lonely hearts column. However, students weren’t advertising themselves for love so much as sharing a bit of banter. Each uni had a ‘fit feed’ where students posted location-specific descriptions of hotties spotted around campus, e.g.:

“Pembroke Library: Female, Blonde, 1^st year classicist, can’t keep my eyes off you, PLEASE let me see your coliseum.”

Launched in April, the site received over 5m hits and covered 52 unis. It was forced to close after only one month due to mounting pressure from universities and Martell was fined by UCL for “bringing the college into disrepute”.

Despite some unis claimed that FitFinder was too distracting, they have been tolerant of Facebook which had very similar origins. Its prototype, ‘Facemash’, was created by Mark Zuckerberg as a Harvard version of HotOrNot.com. The real objection to FitFinder wasn’t procrastination. It was that students weren’t only documenting the ‘buff tings’ around campus but also the physical failings of their aesthetically-challenged peers (one post at UCL read,“body of an angel… face of a smashed crab”).

The FitFinder homepage has nearly 10,000 signatures petitioning its return and Martell has stated he plans to bring the site back. He’s already been approached by entrepreneurs looking to expand FitFinder to festivals and to create a mobile app. Brands could play upon the mating game facilitating boy- meets-girl in specific locations. Despite having come under fire for its ‘MunterHunter’ alter ego, FitFinder was always intended as banter between friends. The Fit Finding phenomenon isn’t over yet.

This blog also appears on Brand Republic's blog, The Wall