Campus Romper.. an idea..

Hi Guys,

I recently hit upon this idea of doing a social networking site (you must be thinking, oh! no.. yet another Orkut clone...! but guys hear me out and u just might like it!). Orkut has been a revelation in bringing all our friends together under one umbrella. But too much of anything starts getting messy, and the scrapbook was a initially a rage cos it enabled others to spy the others scrapbook, has exceeded its expiry date. Lots of orkuters have started deleting scraps and having conversations offline which beats the whole concept of scrapbook. Then you have the friends list which keeps on growing every passing day with no feature to categorize them.

What I have come up with is a social networking site mainly focused on the college-going crowd. Some of the features that I like to see in this are:

An user can be associated to an university, to a college, to a dept or even right down to his/her batch.

While this will have the adding and accepting friend flow as in orkut, the friends will be categorized based on their University or College or Department etc. This categorization helps in organizing ones friends list.

Categorization by batch allows one to view his/her seniors batch mates et al.

Provision will be provided for sponsoring events and the targeted audience can also be restricted by the event organizer. For eg. say, College ABC is holding a intra college fest. The portal allows the organizers to put in a web page for the even. They can also define the audience scope (the college in this case). Some one belonging to that college can register his participation for that event thru this portal. The organizers will be given all the creative freedom to furnish their event while also giving them participant info and the like. In affect they would be creating their own web portal and managing it.

It also allows users to share their projects, it source code, presentations and the like.

An instant online chat similar to a Google talk web client will be provided for pinging a person who is online. A global chat will be provided for an event where one can ask their doubts and get those clarified from the organizers.

Polls can be done at the University/ College/ Department/ Batch or event levels and only the members who are part of them will have the voting rights.

These are some of the ‘must have’ features that we’d like to incorporate in the portal. There may be some wish lists that you might like to find in this solution. Your suggestions, in this regard are most welcome. The vision is to make this solution a one stop shop for a college grad, touching every aspect of his/her campus life.