The JP Allen Blog

The second installment of our new Freshman Seminar class, “Social Networking and Online Community”, wrapped up this week.  Check out these great projects from our first-year business majors:

San FREEcisco

A user-generated collection of free things to do in the city, targeting primarily San Francisco’s 72,000 students at 23 colleges and universities.  Users will be able to express interest in events, invite others, and comment on events, while friends can subscribe to events and pictures flagged by their social network.  Advertising and merchandise are the main revenue sources for this low-cost business idea.

Resume 2.0

A facebook application for uploading resumes and finding internships for college students.  Despite facebook being the hub for college student interaction, there is no serious competition for this application yet.  Resume 2.0 will offer templates and automatic upload of existing resumes, along with a possibility for instant video interviews.  Revenue will come from premium services and advertising.

San Francisco Volunteer Network

An online community focused on volunteer opportunities for San Francisco high school students required to perform community service.  No other destination is focused on making high school community service opportunities easy to find, and helping students and organizations track volunteer hours.  Users will be able to see which volunteer opportunities their friends are participating in.

YouMix

Like at popular Asian sites such as SongTaste and K8, users will be able to make their own karaoke mixes, upload vocals from their computers, and comment on other users’ mixes.  Revenue will come from ads, and a paid iPhone application.

Congrats to Peggy Takahashi and the entire Freshman Launch Program team for creating an outstanding first year business major experience from scratch.  Given the quality of work we’ve seen from the students, we now know we can do a lot more with them during their entire four years at the McLaren College of Business.

The Syllabus and Readings for the Social Networking and Online Communities seminar are available under open content licenses, so take a look and grab anything that might be useful.  Again, the idea was to provide an introduction to business that examined both ‘traditional’ and ‘digital’ business.  Last semester’s experience was written up in this previous post.

After the first run of the new Social Networking/Online Community seminar for 1st year business students at USF, we’re ready to do it again in the spring.  Curious minds can find the updated syllabus and detailed reading list for the course here.

The student project for the seminar was to propose a new business use of Social Networking/Online Community technology.  Here are the concepts they came up with:

RateMyCaf.com

A site for college students to rate cafeteria food items, and provide food suggestions.  Proposed pilot at USF (Bon Appetit), but with an eye towards a nationwide rollout.  Revenue from ads targeted to a college age demographic, and subscription fees from cafeteria food providers.  72 of 75 USF students surveyed said they would want to use this site.

Gimme-a-ride.com

A ridesharing site that would interface nicely with couchsurfing.com, a popular service for finding free places to stay.  Unlike the rideshare forum on Craigslist, gimme-a-ride.com would use profiles and user feedback to give potential ridesharers more confidence in who they’re catching a ride with.  Gimme-a-ride.com would also allow searches based on when and where a ride is desired.  Revenue from ads focused on discount travel services.  Longer term, the proposal is to develop forums with travel advice focused on the bargain domestic traveler.

iConnect

A proposal to add voice-driven messages, status updates, and ratings to the existing BMW iDrive car computer.  Provide social networking focused on location-based topics of interest to drivers, but within an exclusive community of BMW drivers.  Software would be added to all BMWs equipped with iDrive, but activation would require a subscription.

RecruitMe.com

A site focused on recruiting underappreciated ‘non-star’ high school players for NCAA competition.  The site would combine stats from MaxPreps.com, video hosting from YouTube, and Skype video chats with a social networking layer to create an easy-to-use site for athletes to specify their playing preferences, and for coaches to quickly search for talent they wouldn’t ordinarily be exposed to.  A premium service model based on how much material student-athletes load onto their profiles.

Slides from today’s social networking seminar at USF’s Center for Instruction and Technology are available here.

Do social networking sites like Facebook have any ‘real’ academic uses? It’s a controversy we tried to engage. The seminar gave some background on social networking and Facebook, how students use social networking, and case studies of how University faculty and staff are using Facebook. The seminar also dealt with two scenarios:

1. A student wants to be my ‘friend’ online. What should I do?
2. There’s a Facebook group about me (or my colleague)? What should I do?

A few takeaways for me from the discussion:

• There was very healthy staff interest in Facebook, probably more so than from the faculty.
• Groups about faculty, staff, and other students are already happening at USF. University Life does investigate Facebook groups as possible violations of our harassment policy, if brought to their attention.
• No matter how much data indicates that students are using privacy controls and ‘limited profiles’, staff and faculty are still very concerned that employers and others will see inappropriate photos and comments.
• There’s already a fair amount of online community education going on in University Life, and Career Services. As we educate the students, I hope we take the time to teach students about their total online presence (not just Facebook), and how to use their online presence as a positive as well as a negative–to showcase student skills and professional expertise. If the online search is becoming the new resume, we need to get students ready.

Thanks to John Bansavich at CIT for organizing the seminar, and thanks to Xeno (Xi Zhang), a master’s student in Computer Science, for contributing a student perspective to the seminar.

Question: Does writing half a paper, and having 40 online friends, make me an expert on social networking? Maybe!

I’ll be running a social networking workshop for faculty and staff at USF on October 24th. What I need are two (or more) students to stop by the workshop and chat for a few minutes about how they use Facebook. It will be fun, I promise! If you can help out, let me know.

The enticing workshop description (10/24/07, 12:15-1:15pm, Center for Instruction & Technology):

SOCIAL NETWORKING

Are you on Facebook yet? This workshop will either inspire you to connect and collaborate with your students and colleagues in exciting new ways, or leave you shaking your head in wonder. We will discuss: how students, academics, and professionals are using social networking; tips for how to cope with students being your “friend” and other interesting dilemmas; the new applications being built on top of social networking; and how social networking can fit into a larger online collaboration strategy that includes profiles, social bookmarking, blogs, wikis, and shared task lists.