Party planner: new networking site organizes social events on college campuses

By: Stephanie Musat

Posted: 9/5/08

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Jay Rodrigues got some odd requests on his Facebook account when he graduated high school. Once he logged onto his Facebook, he found a new user vying for his virtual friendship - nothing out of the ordinary. But when he clicked on the link to see who it was, he was surprised and slightly freaked out by who was on the other end.

One of his high school teachers had petitioned to be his cyber-friend, opening his personal life (and the pictures from the previous weekend) to someone from whom he felt he deserved a sense of anonymity.

So he made his own social site, only available to college students.

"I wanted to create a Web site which would allows college students to socialize in a secure area where you don't necessarily have to think about who will see your photos, how you express yourself," he said. "You create a profile to express yourself in your college world, not for the rest of the world."

The idea for Dormnoise.com started in Rodrigues's freshman year at the University of Pennsylvania. The Web site officially launched this August, in his sophomore year at the university's Wharton School of Business.

Dormnoise.com is intended to be a social site where groups on college campuses post events on an interactive calendar that can be added to the user's personal homepage.

The calendar displays concert times, parties and "is intended to consolidate student social lives," he said.

"At least at Penn, the social life is very disorganized," he said. "Here, student groups are huge and are center of social life. People crumple up flyers and throw them away; mass e-mails are confusing. Parties would trickle down by word of mouth but I thought was missing sometimes."

Only college students with a valid .edu e-mail address can register to view the site.

When students log on, they are grouped by their college campus and are unable to view any other college homepages.

The Web site has approximately 1,600 members across more than 115 college campuses. Syracuse University currently has 27 members.

Rodrigues attributes the rapid growth of the Web site to the simplistic foundation off of which the site was built.

Unlike the platform on which Facebook operates, additional applications cannot be added to personal pages. This keeps the Web site clean and easy to navigate.

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg told Time Magazine that the site grew in popularity due to the expansion of its audience as well as Facebook Platform, which launched in May 2007.

Platform allows outside developers to create applications to put on Facebook. More than 5,000 applications are on Facebook with 100 new applications added per day.

Jonathan Hsu, creator of the fourth-most popular application, SuperPoke!, said he and his friends were bored with the standard Facebook applications, so they created one of their own. Hsu recalled sitting around with the group brainstorming ideas for Facebook when they thought of an application that would allow users to do more than just poke would be popular.

"It's boring to get poked, but it's funny to get b*tch slapped or get a sheep thrown at you. We hacked all weekend, and that's how SuperPoke! was born," Hsu said.

By downloading Platform capabilities from Facebook, anyone can create applications accessible to all Facebook users.

Since Facebook users and outside corporations can create applications, the Facebook homepage is flooded with thousands of applications, something that Rodrigues wanted to prevent.

"Sites like Facebook are really cluttered with extra stuff. For this Web site, our core principle is to keep it very simple," Rodrigues said.

TJ Ross, a junior management major agrees with the simplistic adage because applications on sites like Facebook make the pages look "tacky."

Ross doesn't have an account on Dormnoise.com, but is intrigued by what it offers.

"It seems like a pretty good idea," he said. "Everyone ends up making calls on Friday nights to see what's going on, so having parties and events online would make socializing easier."

To spread the Web site, Rodrigues targeted 17 universities across the country. These universities are samples of the college spectrum, displaying different sizes, education and students, he said.

Among these colleges are Brown University, University of Pittsburgh, Georgetown, Elon and SU.

Volunteers from Dormnoise.com recently came to SU where they gave out 1,200 T-shirts, postcards and bottleopeners.

Bill Chin, a freshman in the Martin J. Whitman School of Management, said although the Web site is a good idea, he isn't sure if it will be practical on a college campus.

"You aren't going to go online to find a party," he said. "It seems like a simple Facebook to me."

This idea is something that Rodrigues is trying to combat. It's not a Web site to be put in place of the networking giants. It is intended to work in tandem with them, he said.

"When people don't understand the site, they think its just Facebook, and they just dismiss it," he said. "It's a site not out there to take over Facebook, that's not at all what the site is about."

sdmusat@syr.edu