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August 30, 2010, 02:00 PM ET

College-Only Social Network Debuts in the Ivy League

Josh Weinstein, a 2009 graduate of Princeton University, remembers waiting eagerly for his official college e-mail address the summer before freshman year. An address ending in .edu would give him access to Facebook, an online social network that only college students could join.

Oh, how times have changed.

Everyone and their mothers, and fathers, are on Facebook. But Mr. Weinstein hasn't given up hope: He's created a Web site where students can post messages, pictures, and events away from the prying eyes of parents and professors. The site, CollegeOnly, went up on Wednesday, and right now students from Cornell, Princeton, and Yale Universities can sign up. Those colleges were among the campuses where Mr. Weinstein's other creations—GoodCrush, an online matchmaking service, and RandomDorm, a college-only version of Chatroulette—were especially popular. Mr. Weinstein and his team plan to expand CollegeOnly to several other campuses, including Dartmouth College and Duke University, in the next few weeks, he said.

CollegeOnly isn't the only new venture that aims to create a more private online social network for undergraduates. This spring, four students at New York University began working on Diaspora, a network that intends to give its users more control over what they share. Unlike CollegeOnly, Diaspora will not require its users to be college students.

Don't expect either of these projects to steal Facebook's star power any time soon, though. The Silicon Valley behemoth has gotten so big that even Hollywood wants a piece of it. October will see the release of The Social Network, a movie about Facebook and its founder, Mark Zuckerberg.

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Comments

1. arrive2__net - August 30, 2010 at 05:24 pm

Speciality social media sites are likely to work and be successful in their niche market (and at least where parents are concerned) they may ease the parents' minds a little bit about what the student could be exposed to. Students can get wild and crazy, but the wider world can get wilder and crazier.

Ideas that may bore the wider world may be of interest to those who are sharing an experience and a situation. Students can participate in various niche social media sites, and in the wider world sites too, if they can find the time.

Bernard Schuster
Arrive2.net

2. 11159995 - August 30, 2010 at 08:03 pm

Uh, excuse me if I'm missing something, but parents who are college graduates will have in many cases the option of using an e-mail address that ends in "edu" because alumni associations, like the one at Princeton, offer this opportunity. --Sandy Thatcher (PU '65)

3. premierpixels - August 30, 2010 at 09:41 pm

Yeah, there are parents who has email addresses that ends with .edu so maybe they can manually reject applications from email addresses of a certain period it was created or they have other plan for this.

Maria Lorena
Las Vegas Web Design

4. drjeff - August 31, 2010 at 11:00 am

The alumni email addresses I've seen (which I admit are limited to MIT and Brown) always have "alumni" in the address, like "me@alumni.school.edu"; this would make such filtering exceptionally easy to do, at least as such schools. The harder question is what to do about members when they graduate. I presume no-one's asking yet about what happens when THEIR kids go to college.

5. adastra - August 31, 2010 at 12:21 pm

I suspect that online social networking privacy is still going to be as secure as your 5th-grade diary-with-a-key. Not.

6. mcphslibrary - August 31, 2010 at 01:42 pm

Don't forget those of us in higher ed who have .edu addresses as well. I'm sure the undergrads wouldn't want us to see, anymore than their parents, what they might be posting.

7. 11159995 - August 31, 2010 at 03:23 pm

Not to mention the retirees who are allowed to keep their regular "edu" e-mail addresses, as I have after retiring from Penn State (where I was employed while three of my children were undergraduates).---Sandy Thatcher

8. weidads - August 31, 2010 at 03:49 pm

Sandy Thatcher's observations have been anticipated by the College Only folks. See their FAQ at http://blog.collegeonly.com

9. jabberwocky12 - September 04, 2010 at 12:23 am

Not to mention that this is limited to the USA only. There are just a few (like a couple of hundred million) students in the world whose email addresses do not end in "edu" The site should be called USACollegeOnly.

Then, again, this is pretty much how Facebook started in the first place - I think they're trying to pull a fast one here.