Harvard #1 in... Online Awkwardness?

UPDATED: Oct. 23, 2013 at 10:07 p.m.

We all know—some of us a little too proudly—that Harvard ranks among the best colleges for just about everything, minus HUDS tater tots. Recently, Harvard was on top as #1 yet again—this time, in  an online ranking of the top 100 social media colleges.

This comes at little surprise, given that Harvard is the birthplace of Facebook and awkward social norms. But what exactly do these rankings mean?

The site doing the ranking, Student Advisor, claims that “these innovative schools use social media to give students insight into their culture, personality and DNA.” Um, ok. I didn’t really know that Facebook had gene testing, but as long as we’re first, I guess I have no problem with it.

A look through the other schools that rank among the top ten shows that the survey seems really to be based on the connectivity of students and the prevalence of official university accounts on Facebook, Twitter, and other social media platforms.

Stanford is a close second due to the fact that it “uses social media data to study tourism rates of the world’s natural areas,” which is great for everyone who happens to be looking into visiting rural Palo Alto.

And Yale broke into the top five due to their new Tumblr blog and ramp-up of Facebook and Twitter, most likely due to an overly-defensive PR strategy in the aftermath of the actions of a certain famed feces-spreader (and no, it wasn't their bulldog).

But did we deserve to win? In my opinion, certainly. I don’t visit the Class of 2017 Facebook group often, but when I do, I see posts about lost phones, half-brags about trips to Djibouti, and wars with MIT. The fact that we even have the term “Facebook celebrities” is indicative of the honor, however dubious, we place on those who have established themselves online. At other places, like my high school, these people would be called “weird”. Kudos to you, Harvard.

So tweet on, my classmates, and I’ll see you online sometime.