Want a Masters degree in Youniverse Studies?

Academia catching up with the modern world? Apparently.

The UK's Birmingham City University is offering a social media course- so if you're fluent in Facebook, turned on to Twitter and know your way around some of the more crazily patterned MySpace pages, you could have just found a Masters degree right up your street. As long as you've got the £4,400 tuition fees for the one year course (assuming the Government doesn't increase that further), you've struck gold.  

New plans to replace history or geography in schools with blogs and Twitter seem a bit laughable when you consider that the generation of kids who will be being 'taught' will be growing up with social media as a given. I'm not convinced that they'll need teaching how to be technologically fluent and I think they'll probably know more than the teachers. Surely that's not going to make for an engaging lesson?

Joking aside, is social media something that really needs to be taught? Is it something you can even teach?

New week, new Youniverse (very soon)... Welcome to spring?

The new look Youniverse is nearly ready to be launched... it's pretty exciting so, as always, watch this space for updates and more details!

Maybe 'welcome to spring' is a bit too optimistic- I've just looked out of the window to see it's pretty gloomy outside and rain's pelting the window. But a little rain never hurt anyone- and at least the trees will love it! 

Nothing like a bit of optimism/good mood to help see the silver veils lining those clouds. Trust me, it instantly makes your day better!

Jargon? Really? Sounds like meaningful dialogue mechanisms are needed...

The UK Local Government Association has created a list of 200 words which it says should not be used by local councils to encourage more effective communication.

I find it a pretty surprising list, really. The article which accompanies it suggests that it is simply full of cliches or unnecessary words which have been developed from already existing (and perfectly adequate) ones- 'potentiality' instead of 'potential', for example. While there are some tired and overworked phrases in there, there's a lot of the list which seems surprisingly, well, normal... especially for use in Government documents... 

I decided to write this short piece about Youniverse:

Youniverse uses Imagini's unique VisualDNA technology to create a range of quizzes (covering areas such as music, movies, creativity and wellbeing), designed to allow you a greater vision of yourself by being able to visualize your personality. The core message of Youniverse is 'be understood', and we aim to engage our users by getting them to express themselves visually, which facilitates meeting like-minded people and making new friends with compatible personalities. We also have some collaborations and partnerships with other sites- you can take quizzes for MyDeco, hotels.com and Pepsi. All of this is designed to enhance your experience on Youniverse. 

So... did you understand that? It does contain 8 banned words (that's about one illegal word per line)... Can you work out which ones? Suggestions and comments welcome, as always! (Oops... used another one there... I'm such a rebel.)

Oh, and if you want to see the full banned jargon list, you can read it here.

Going green... but today it's not for the planet

Chances are, if you're reading this today and it's after midday (ahem), you've already started on the Guinness (or Baileys or Jamesons or another beverage of the alcoholic and Irish variety)... even if it is just for the cool hat!

Or, if you're feeling really flash, you could have all the fountains in your mansion pump out green water as part of the festivities. 

Whatever way you choose to celebrate... Happy St. Patrick's Day from all at Youniverse!

 

What more can I say?

Hmmm... well, it's been all quiet on the Youniverse Blog front lately, hasn't it? Especially after all the excitement of releasing the first bits of redesign and new graphics- a tantalizing taste of the new look we're designing!

There'll be more about that in later posts though...

For now, spring has come to London! Yes, in typical British style (ahem), it's straight to a weather report. If I could, I'd make you a nice cup of tea to go with it. Maybe in a teapot. With a tea cosy. How quaint.

New photo upload-ability!

As well as beginning a site redesign, we're also beginning to release lots more improvements to make Youniverse a better experience for you. 

Today's announcement is (*drum roll, trumpets etc*)... you can upload photos up to 2Mb to your profile! Yay!

New Look Youniverse

Hopefully you've noticed that Youniverse has something of a new design today- we hope you like it. At the moment, it's just a start...

Our team here has begun a process of improving and redesigning the site, so over the next few weeks there will be some changes.

Some of the new stuff will be fairly obvious and some will be more behind-the-scenes stuff, but we hope it'll make Youniverse a better experience!

If you've got any feedback, you can comment here or get in touch at anna@youniverse.com...