Facebook watch out. There’s a new social media cowboy in town. No parents. No alumni. No employers. Just students.
After hearing complaints that students couldn’t be themselves on Facebook because employers check profiles before interviews, or parents check up on your social activities, Josh Weinstein set out to rectify this problem. He is the founder of CollegeOnly, a social media site that is only for college students. “You don’t have to worry about hiding what you’re doing. Just be yourself,” he told Youth Radio.
With the catchy slogan, “Connecting Student Bodies,” the site is launching at various college campuses in time for the 2010 - 2011 school year. In fact, it launched at University of Pennsylvania today. Weinstein’s first online social venture was the dating-focused GoodCrush. He chose the schools to launch CollegeOnly based on how many students were active on GoodCrush. “We’ve gotten 300 requests to bring CollegeOnly to their campus, but we like to have a connection with someone there. Students can fill out an application to be a student representative. We’ll send them t-shirts, wristbands, etc. to help spread the word.”
Weinstein described CollegeOnly as, “an all-purpose social club.” They try to have parties once a month on participating campuses to connect people in person as well as online. “I created it with the intention of creating real-life connections, and making campus more fun. We want to get people together figuratively, and physically.”
Some of you may be familiar with Craigslist’s “Missed Connections” section, where people can describe memorable moments or people that passed too quickly, in hopes of re-connecting with that person. CollegeOnly has a Missed Connections section as well, with a unique double-blind feature. Weinstein said, “It’s like Craigslist, but not as creepy. With the double-blind feature, you can post anonymously, and people can respond to people anonymously. You can carry on an anonymous dialogue with another person.”
Weinstein said he knows someone who responded to a Missed Connection post on CollegeOnly that read, “I’m a guy looking for a date,” and they’ve been dating for a while now. “It’s weird, but awesome,” said Weinstein.
Weinstein has been fielding many questions about security issues related to CollegeOnly. He does think that people should separate their public social resume from their online social identity, but students shouldn't have to worry about putting up pictures of their Saturday night celebrations. A major concern is how to keep alumni off the site. He responded in a recent blog post:
A: There is a repository of email addresses that we can cross-reference
A: Our users will be able to submit a list of email addresses (teachers, administrators) to be permanently banned/blocked from the site
A: We have moderators – including current students on-campus
A: We display users’ email addresses (currently to all users, though we may change this to only our moderators) to help crowdsource the solution to this
A: Many schools have prefixes to the school’s email suffix to help weed out unwanted folks (e.g. alumni.princeton.edu, aya.yale.edu, post.harvard.edu)
Post new comment