By By Dani Frank and Rebecca Astheimer

Greetings, our four readers (hi, Mom!). Welcome back to another year of Hofstra University and Two Girls One Column. For those newcomers [Freshmeat], we welcome you and look forward to seeing you drunkenly stumble across the Hempstead Turnpike within the next couple weeks. We thought we’d open up this semester with a discussion of the highly controversial topic of: Facebook applications. What are they, how much of your time do they waste, and how many ulcers have you developed since you have started playing? After much debate over Farmville, Sorority Life and Pet Pupz (hope you notice that z), we agonized until we decided to sample the brilliant stroke of genius that is YoVille.
Just to establish something, we are not proponents of Facebook applications. We have partaken in practically none of them over the past few years, so our decision to try out quite possibly the lamest of the lame, YoVille, was strictly scientific. We would ask you, too, to stop playing so many of them because they are polluting our MiniFeeds. We don’t care if you’ve lost a black sheep in Farmville, we have humiliating pictures to detag. Start a Facebook fight with us if you must, but at least we don’t take such quizzes as: “When will your first baby be born?” Answer being in five months. But back to the ever pressing topic of YoVille. What’s it like? What does it do to your brain?  Let us begin.
The first order of business is to choose a name and gender and design a character.  This is pretty cool, mainly because there is a mutton chops option. Plus, you can have blue lips. So we’re off to a good start. We find ourselves in the land of the Yo and we discover that we are surprisingly…confused. Who are these people standing around us? Why is “Y Money” throwing water balloons at us? What did we ever do to “Y Money?” We don’t know, but we’re giving it right back to you.
Let’s continue. The more we play, the more we realize that this is disturbingly similar to the Sims. You can make friends, design your house, work, own pets, etc. The only difference is that it’s definitely not the Sims. It’s a sad, sad attempt to mimic every other popular role playing game out there.  The most insulting aspect of YoVille is that they expect players to spend their actual hard-earned money on YoCoins; $70,000 to $100.  Yes, that is 100 real dollars, that could provide a starving child in Hempstead, NY with a month’s worth of Wings ‘n Things cuisine, as opposed to “pimping your Yo’s pad” with a new mood lamp.
At this point, we were completely disgusted with ourselves and our experiment, and we had to abort our mission.  The Yo’s used to ask us to visit everyday to become best friends, and now we can’t even disco with them anymore! Goodbye, Sky Nightclub, we hardly knew ye.  In conclusion, the only thing YoVille has impressed us with is the fact that in this day and age, and economy, Facebook has somehow managed to generate an application that is presumptuous enough to ask its players to spend their real money on a cheap knockoff of the Sims.  And the game isn’t even that fun, people.  On a scale of getting insulted by Kanye West at the VMA’s to winning as many Moonmens, YoVille ranks on this scale on a par with reading Helen Keller’s Twitter Feed.  Which is pretty cool at first, but then you realize what she is typing isn’t words, it’s just guttural sounds.  So next time you sit down to work in YoVille’s widget factory, contemplate going for a walk instead. Sincerely, Duane “Dog” and Beth Chapman.