Likealittle.com is the new big thing on the Virtual Stanford Scene. It’s an open, anonymous missed connections forum for all the people you lock eyes with in a crowd and lose. (Or maybe hook up with at a party and forget the name of.) This column is mostly a defense of the fact that I peruse it. Occasionally. (Oh come on, I don’t need another guilty pleasure.)

It’s one salve for the crowded but cluttered campus the school can be, where it’s easy to collide with someone and impossible to get them to stop and chat, let alone schedule a date. Every once in a while, it looks like two people actually do find each other, which is pretty delightful to witness. There are quite a few freshmen lusting after RAs, which is almost always adorable and amusing. And there’s lots of flirting between individuals in relationships or near-relationships: “We’re playing Starcraft together and I just can’t believe how lucky I am!” (More or less equivalent to breeding a species of albino shouting gorilla to summit skyscrapers and bellow your love to the city below.)

The thing is that there’s a surprisingly low percentage of explicitly creepy, one-sided crushes. Part of this is due to moderately low traffic (so far as the Internet goes) and moderately good moderating. But there’s also a pretty intense feeling of community. The site is institutionally and geographically bounded, and relatively popular within those constraints. People you know, in person, whose opinions you care about, will read the things that you write here. And even though they won’t know it’s you, what you end up posting will probably be affected by their audience.

The site reeks of community. Strangers help strangers hook up with friends of friends.

“That guy I danced with at Mausoleum, with the vest and stuff.”

“Like, a shiny vest!”

“Yeah!”

“I don’t know his name, but I can find it out for you: he’s my friend’s cousin!”

Not a case of distant Internet-stalking. This is people connecting through people. Which is pretty…quaint.

On another occasion, one guy posted about one girl who looks like some celebrity, and eight more people respond that they don’t know her, but lose their minds whenever she walks by. My first thought: creepy. Objectifying. Ugh. But then I thought, wait, there’s this one person that all these people swoon over. And there’s nothing wrong with swooning. And its kind of nice to watch them commune over her beauty. She’s a little bit like our Garota de Ipanema. White Plaza becomes a Brazilian mercado! (Which makes me Stan Getz…What, you can’t hear the beguiling saxophone riffs in this column?)

And last weekend, a friend wrote me, “Look what I found!” because he saw a post that could’ve been about another friend of mine: the panda on Halloween, “if only I had some bamboo :(.” I wrote back, “Look what I did!” and posted about another mutual friend’s Halloween costume. (Rather unconventional, is all I’ll say.) The Panda wrote me later that day all excited and directed me to it. She did it wrong and I ended up at the Ipanema post instead. Looked up the celebrity and decided it was definitely one of her friends. When we sorted it out, I got to show her the panda post and take all the credit for my own contribution. If that doesn’t scream community—f and by association, a legitimate use of my time—I don’t know what does.

It’s also great how this makes talking and thinking about aesthetic features of strangers a little more normalized. Because I do that. Occasionally.

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