Today, we all gather to nominate Bevii and this terrible, horrible, no-good, very bad idea into the Dumb Idea Hall-of-Fame.
In order to promote their new startup social network, the University of North Carolina students behind Bevii decided to create an email alert to some “shots fired” on campus. Whoa-ho! Watch out! Facebook is dooooooown.
Except the joke’s not funny and it probably freaked out a good majority of the students who read it. Well, unless they read the whole thing and saw that the alert was “sponsored by the social media police.”
The email mimicked the official Alert Carolina emergency alerts that all UNC students would be used to, and hit their inboxes under the subject line “INFORMATIONAL MESSAGE FROM ALERT CAROLINA.”
Valleywag has the entire email, and here’s what it said:
Chapel Hill police are investigating a report of innovation which occurred around 10:01 a.m. Monday, October 14, in the general area of Franklin St. and N. Columbia St. At precisely 10:01am yesterday, in broad daylight, shots were fired on Franklin Street. The victim is being described as a blue, outdated social network.
The current suspect is Bevii, a mobile, location-based social network only available to select Universities. Bevii, apparently, makes and values your relationships automatically based on who you spend time with. For more information on the suspect, click here
Reportedly, over 500 UNC Students have already been affected by the victim.
Sponsored by the Social Media Police of Chapel Hill.
Apparently, the folks at Bevii haven’t heard that one thing about not even kinda joking about the mere possibility of a emergency event at a public university. I think it’s covered in the “What the F*ck are You Thinking” section in the student’s handbook.
It’s a pretty tough launch error to overcome, I’d assume, considering Bevii just went live on iOS and Android a few days ago. Oh, and the fact that UNC’s IT department has apparently blocked Bevii.com from being accessible on campus.
ITS officials: students can no longer access http://t.co/vJTGaZ0POJ or Bevii, the social media site which sent the message, from UNC server
— Amanda Albright (@amanda_albright) October 15, 2013
In case this didn’t turn you off completely, and you want to know more, Bevii describes itself as “a mobile, location-based social networking app that automatically builds and values relationships for you. Bevii uses this relationship information to show you all the content you want to see without all the clutter you don’t.”
Image via Wikimedia Commons
