SpeedPlexer Blog

Until recently, incoming students arrived at their college dorm rooms to find a perfect stranger waiting to share his or her space. But today, more colleges let incoming students take advantage of internet speed  to find an ideal roommate, says the New York Times.

In some ways, social networking sites like Facebook have pressured colleges to relinquish control of the roommate process to their dormers. In the past few years, housing officers have been besieged by complaints from students and parents who looked up assigned roommates on the Internet and did not like what they saw, whether it was goth makeup or beer cans in the background.

While many colleges still insist on pairing roommates themselves, either randomly or carefully, a growing number are turning the choice over to students. Some universities have contracted with matchmaking companies like Lifetopia and RoomBug, which offer secure Web-based services. Others are acceding to a wave of roommate requests from students who use unrestricted sites like URoomSurf, and others have created Facebook pages to help students share information.

Matches made on URoomSurf.com do for dormitory life what eHarmony and Match.com have long done for romance. Each fills out a questionnaire covering study habits, overnight guests, tidiness, politics, sexual orientation and religion, among other topics, then received a list of other soon-to-be freshmen who had registered on the site, ranked by compatibility.

Housing officials say that “roommate self-selection,” as the process is known, empowers students while cutting down on irksome appeals to switch later on. But some worry that it robs young adults of an increasingly rare opportunity for growth: exposure to someone with different experiences and opinions. But isn’t going away to college stressful enough without finding yourself sharing space with someone wholly incompatible?

Jet Blue, the airline that’s been getting a lot of press in regards to one flight attendant, seems to have expertly addressed the entire internet and perhaps therefore all media in one skillful stroke of using internet speed.

While the flight attendant, Steven Slater, was busy garnering the public’s support with his story, passengers began coming forward with a very different story. Jet Blue waiting to respond, only posting a comment to their blog 48 hours afterward. 

It wouldn’t be fair for us to point out absurdities in other corners of the industry without acknowledging when it’s about us. Well, this week’s news certainly falls into that category. Perhaps you heard a little story about one of our flight attendants? While we can’t discuss the details of what is an ongoing investigation, plenty of others have already formed opinions on the matter. Like, the entire Internet. (The reason we’re not commenting is that we respect the privacy of the individual. People can speak on their own behalf; we won’t do it for them.)

While this episode may feed your inner Office Space, we just want to take this space to recognize our 2,300 fantastic, awesome and professional Inflight Crewmembers for delivering the JetBlue Experience you’ve come to expect of us.

Fast Company, a magazine about doing business creatively, said, “It’s a wily little post, expertly done—mixing cheeky self-deprecation, ostensible privacy concerns, an apt and funny YouTube link (to the Office Space movie), and only the tiniest dose of PR pablum. What’s fascinating, however, is that these 140 or so words constitute almost the entire response to a story that has had every media outlet scrambling all week. Better yet: it did the trick.”