‘FITTIES’ WILL no longer go undetected on York campus. Just six months after student phenomenon FitFinder was forced off the web in May 2010, Fitradar is here to take up its mantle.
The original FitFinder website became hugely popular since its launch on 24 April 2010. The website received over five million hits and played host to over 50 universities across the UK. The idea was that students can post descriptions of all the attractive people they have spotted around campus in the hope of getting their attention.
The new website fitradar.co.uk functions in exactly the same way as its predecessor, but is yet to receive the same impressive attention. It is currently limited to just York, Cardiff, Leeds, Manchester, Oxford and Sheffield. Sheffield and Oxford are the only pages in frequent use, while York and the others have just a handful of messages. “Do you want to get to know that hot girl who’s always in the library? How about the mysterious guy that you saw at the Student’s Union? Send out a fitradar right here by typing in a few details about them, and see if they get in touch via our personal messaging service. Don’t let the chance for a cheeky date pass you by!”
Dominic Wroblewski of the University of Sheffield is the new man behind Fitradar. Meanwhile the original FitFinder site flirts that “something special is coming…” FitFinder creator, Rich Martell, was put under immense pressure to take the website down. Universities were concerned that it was distracting students from their studies. He was fined £300 by UCL for bringing the university into disrepute and was anxious that his degree would be jeopardised. A campaign to bring back FitFinder following its demise was launched at the University of York and gained national media attention. The campaign was led by York Vision columnist, Scott Bryan, after he was approached by Martell himself. Bryan created the Facebook group entitled “BRING BACK FITFINDER” which boasted over 2 200 members within a week. Bryan, like many other University students, understood FitFinder to be “a major source of friendly banter and harmless fun in the same way as Facebook and Twitter”.
Ben Nagle-Rose, a second year studying Archeology, is just one York student excited to see the arrival of Fitradar. He commented that “FitFinder was a lot of fun and provided a welcome break from the tediousness of the library every once and a while.” Last year’s YUSU Welfare Officer, Ben Humphrys, shared his opinion with Vision on the popular FitFinder: “This website is bizarre and… if I’m honest, slightly creepy, it reminds me most of secondary school kids perving on classmates/teachers.” The future of Fitradar and indeed the FitFinder remain to be seen. Wroblewiski informed Oxford University’s Cherwell that he hopes his University, Sheffield, will be “more lenient when it comes to a website such as Fitradar than UCL.”