I’ve been reading about all the recent changes at Facebook like integrating information feeds for their user’s actions at other sites and the privacy wall that continues to get lower. A Techcrunch article talks about competitors for Facebook in the “college students only” market and how viable any of them are. Many of the comments on that story point to a resistance by Facebook users to ever want to leave what they have with Facebook. There is, however, one angle to this social networking concept most are missing.
While the initial idea won’t seem as cool or even trustworthy to most students at first glance, University-sponsored social networks are a hugely overlooked opportunity.
Indiana University, as an example, has over 98,000 students spread across 9 campuses. That’s almost 100,000 users already tied together in the same system with usernames and passwords. If IU were to build out a social network, they would immediately have these users in the system (actually using the system is another thing). While this isn’t anywhere near Facebook’s millions of users, I’d be willing to bet that the day to day interactions of the average college student on Facebook is 90% related to his/her friends at the same campus.
In order for this to work, IU would have to be a bit liberal on students usage (read: free speech) and not censor everything it doesn’t like. But, with a strong word-of-mouth campaign and support from a few key on-campus student groups, the social network could take off quite fast. What IU would end up with is a closed social network in an excellent niche. With modest advertising, the site would pay for itself easily. The university would also have a new medium for communication with the student body.
Parting thoughts:
- Savvy IU developers can create a dead-simple Facebook application that exports a file containing your relationships with other IU students for easy import into the IU social network, thereby easing the transition and acceptance
- Savvy businesspeople create a business model around building closed social network systems and selling them to major universities like IU
- An interesting idea would be the option to “connect” one closed social network with another. For example, Indiana University has a campus at Indianapolis called IUPUI it shares with Purdue University.
- My main point here is that universities always have and always will have an amazingly strong position for creating social networks like these because of their endless data on and access to their students (what classes you are taking, who is in your classes, what books you need, how you are doing in a certain class, what books you check out, how often you print things out in the library, where you are logging on from in campus, and so on… think of the Facebooks apps that would exist if that kind of information was available).
If you haven’t heard of Amazon Mechanical Turk, I highly suggest you check it out so you are aware of one of the more interesting pieces of web technology out there today. Basically, it’s a web service that allows you to programmatically allow humans to perform small bits of work for you. An example would be integrating your blog with MT (Mechanical Turk) in such a way that each new blog comment was reviewed by a human and he/she decided if it was spam or not, and marked it appropriately–all of it happening automatically.
What makes the whole thing interesting is that these “turks” are performing these simple actions for extremely small bits of money. Say, $0.01 – $1.00 per action. This whole concept is one type of Crowd Sourcing.
I’ve been kicking around a few concepts for websites that make use of this small army of dedicated servants willing to perform mundane tasks at a cut rate. I’ve become rather addicted to playing around with different types of actions and seeing the kind of results I receive. Once you fund your account with even a few dollars, you can start creating “HITs” (Human Intelligence Tasks). I think my addiction stems from the quick results. Within minutes, results start to come in.
Most recently, I’ve been asking different types of questions just to see the responses I get. For a few dollars, you can get a couple hundred responses within an hour or two. The downside to using this system for surveys is the demographics of the respondents are unknown (unless you put questions in your HIT about the respondent).
The coolest use of this technology I’ve seen has to be the search for Steve Fossett using Amazon Mechanical Turk to let hundreds of people pour over updated satellite images searching for signs of the plane wreckage. This particular HIT was unpaid and I did about 12 of them (I didn’t find anything). Regardless of the results, this was a very creative use and practical application of the technology.
If you have a great idea on how to use Mechanical Turk or other Amazon Web Services, enter the $50,000 Amazon Web Services Start-up Contest.
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