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LikeALittle was a social network service launched on October 25, 2010, by Evan Reas, with the purpose of helping college students flirt with one another. In 2011, TechCrunch reported that "Investors don't just like LikeALittle a little, they like it a lot." The company received $1 million in funding from Andreessen Horowitz on a $10 million valuation.
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The LikeALittle service was discontinued without explanation on July 10, 2012.
History
Reas worked with two co-founders, Prasanna Sankaranarayanan and Shubham Mittal to try to make connections with other students outside of their own university. The newly launched site featured over 50 campuses in just a few months.
When a user commented on a post, they were assigned the name of a fruit. This way users were identifiable within the conversation they are a part of, but were still able to retain their anonymity. Each time they commented on a new post, they received a different name. Users were encouraged to post flirtatious, complimentary, non-inflammatory content. Any user could delete or report posts that they found offensive or abusive. Messages sent to other users remained anonymous. Users could also "like" posts and comments, similar to the ability to like posts and comments on other social networking sites such as Facebook. Users received notifications if their posts, or posts that they had liked or commented on, received activity. These notifications appeared on the main page of the site if the user was logged in. They could also be sent via email or text message(SMS).
Popularity on University/College Campuses
Due to the location-based nature of LikeALittle's flirting system, the website became quite popular among students at universities where a large portion of the campus community revolves around small areas, making them conducive to anonymous online flirting, such as large campus libraries or residences. Popularity and use of the website tended to spike dramatically during exam season and lower to near inactivity during breaks, though at some universities usage was high throughout the year.
Criticism and Privacy Concerns
With LikeALittle's increased presence on university and college campuses, concerns were raised that LikeAlittle may make campuses unsafe by allowing a person or a group of persons to publicly stalk others. Others raised concerns over the increase in sexually explicit comments over more innocent levels of flirting that the site wished to promote. In response to these concerns, the site maintained that it made a strong effort to ensure that cases of stalking, privacy breaches and sexually explicit posts were taken down immediately through the use of computer filters and campus-specific moderators, as well as a small contingent of site-wide moderators.