Allison Karic and Scott Becker make an unlikely couple. He is at least a lanky six feet tall, and Karic is petite. She studies psychology and economics, while he is a bioengineering student.
But together, Karic and Becker have created a service that matches Penn students for "random hookups."
Dating since their senior year at Harvard-Westlake High School in Los Angeles, the pair ended up as freshmen at Penn this fall with very clear ideas about sex and love.
They hoped a school like Penn -- with its thousands of undergraduates and big party scene -- would eliminate the high-school gossip and let people make out with whomever they wanted, free of judgement.
"You go to a party in high school, all your friends will be there, nobody was comfortable enough to make a move," Karic said. "That sucks that everyone is watching and everyone would know. We need a way to fix that."
To expedite the process, Karic and Becker created theinterestlist.com -- formerly known as Whatevericanget.com -- a Web site that anonymously matches Penn students with people they are interested in meeting for random sexual encounters.
Users need a valid Penn e-mail address to create an account, after which they can upload a photograph and list people they want to hook up with.
That list is kept private until two people mutually request each other, when an e-mail is sent to both users notifying them of the match.
Where they go from there, Karic and Becker said, is up to them.
The Web site's original name was an homage to the online Facebook, where users can list what type of relationship they are seeking, from "friendship" to "random play." The term "whatever I can get" encompasses every category.
Some of the Web site's similarities to the Facebook cross the line from being funny to being illegal, according to Facebook spokesman Chris Hughes.
In its original form, Karic and Becker's site displayed photographs from every Penn student's Facebook account, regardless of whether or not those students had signed up for Whatevericanget.com.
"It is against our terms of agreement and illegal for [Karic and Becker] to harvest this information," Hughes said in an e-mail interview.
Whatevericanget.com also had lax security features, allowing students to create accounts without confirming their e-mail address. This let users make accounts in other people's names.
"We understand, yeah, it was sketch," Becker said. "We had good intentions."
As of press time, no Facebook photographs were visible on Whatevericanget.com. Becker said he removed them when he learned he had violated Facebook's terms of service.
Becker renovated the site last night to include higher security features that will require students to verify that they are using their own e-mail address.
"It's all information that we could have seen anyway [on Facebook], and we're making sure that Penn students are the only ones who can log in," Becker said.
He also decided to change the name and URL to theinterestlist.com after hearing complaints that the phrase "whatever I can get" implied that users were desperate for romantic interaction. Either URL will now reroute users to the site.
Despite its shaky legal foundation, the site has taken off. Relying primarily on word of mouth and Facebook messages for advertising, Karic and Becker said 577 users had registered by yesterday.
"It's really a story of liberation from standard high school sexual repression," Becker said. The site "gives you a chance to try [to pursue romantically] people you wouldn't ordinarily try, because it's that easy."
But only approximately 25 percent of users had actually listed people as "interests," or those they were interested in a sexual encounter with. Many say they joined the Web site out of curiosity or as a joke, and that they doubt it will replace more traditional forms of courtship.
"The type of people that don't actually go out and party and are afraid to meet girls -- maybe this will be a way for them to get ass too," said College junior Adam Bromberg, who registered for the Web site last week.
Karic and Becker, however, said the site's success is dependent upon students registering, and they are optimistic about it.
"It's a totally intellectual response to something so physical," Becker said.
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