College Tonight, the new social network for college students that recently went public through a reverse merger, has started to reveal the mobile features intended to make its service more “social” than Facebook and other traditional social networks.
The company has announced a deal with click-to-call widget provider, and phone number obfuscater, Jangl that will 1) enable students to call each other without revealing their phone numbers and 2) allow them to leave voicemails for each other that they can later recall. This latter feature is referred to as the “drunk dial” feature because students are expected to use this functionality to delete the embarrassing messages they left for each other the night before after drinking a wee bit too much.
Call me cynical but I don’t think either of these mobile features will take off on college campuses. First, I don’t really see a need for students to hide their phone numbers because I can’t imagine a common situation in which students want strangers to contact them by phone. Perhaps you could give that cute member of the opposite sex your Jangl number at the bar, but if you’re questioning their desirability you might as well give them a fake number and call them yourself if interested later. As for the recalling of voicemails, what drunk person is actually going to think “hmm, maybe I should use Jangl for this call because I might regret it tomorrow?” Intoxicated people, almost by definition, don’t have that sort of foresight.
College Tonight has hinted at some other mobile features in the pipe: a WAP site, mobile photo uploads, mobile status alerts, “Reply-All Texting”, real-time campus updates, and a feature that notifies you when your crush has entered the building (?!). The company has hired a “former FBI profiler” so I assume this means they’ll be serious about safety and security, especially with regard to this last piece of functionality.
When I spoke with CEO Zachary Suchin a little while ago about his intention to attract college students, he suggested that the mobile functionality of College Tonight would play a major role. So far I’m not persuaded that College Tonight can provide a robust enough set of mobile features to drive college students away from Facebook, but I hope to be proven wrong, if only because I’d love to see social networking via mobile really take off.
Update: CTO Jason Schutzbank says that the Crush Calculator – their name for the feature that helps you locate your crush – will initially require users to manually declare where they are located, but by the second quarter of 2008 it will leverage cell phone towers and GPS to automatically locate users. He also says that the messages left through the Drunk Dial/Jangl integration will be accessible via the website using a visual voicemail of sorts.
as a college student that parties 3 times a week, I think their services are useless and dont see any benefits to using their svcs.
MS CollegeContactor 1.3b, the real thing!
My friends and I use their service in Boston and it’s great to know what’s going on in the area and to be able to coordinate. I’m definitely interested to check out these features. May not be the greatest social network, but for college students right now, this is it for me!
Danny
Another kudo to you Mark. Good post!!
OMFG, it’s like Facebook, but more so, OMFG x 2 L33T
sounds more like a semi-anonymous way to sell weed to me.
You got to be kidding me?! Why the hell are you still giving this company face time? Not only are you wasting your time but you’re wasting readers time. Stop posting on this retarded social net that has no chance of survival… just look at their traffic numbers to know.
I agree with #7… College Tonight announced something very similar in 2006 with Juice Wireless and what came out of that? You’re just giving them more PR, which is exactly what they are looking for. Check out the article below:
http://redherri....com/Home/19357
“Juice Wireless, a company that lets its users post photos, text, and videos to weblogs and Internet profiles, said Tuesday it is teaming up with College Tonight, a new social network that aims to keep college students plugged in to their campus’s social scene.
Members of College Tonight will be able to use Juice Wireless’s networking and mobile content-sharing service, JuiceCaster, to access the social network’s features from any mobile phone with a camera and Internet connection.
College Tonight’s features include local campus event listings, a calculator called the “Inebriation Station” that lets users check their approximate blood alcohol content, and a “Crush Calculator,” which lets members reveal and discover their crushes.
“College students use their mobile phones continually throughout the day and night,” said Nick Desai, chairman and co-founder of Juice Wireless. “With Juice Caster, College Tonight users can share everything that happens instantaneously, the moment it happens.”
The Juice Wireless deal will also give College Tonight members the ability to instantly share photographs or send audio “shout-outs” from the parties and events they are attending via their cell phones for free.
Depending on a member’s privacy settings, these items may be viewed by anyone on campus looking for something to do, or a specific group of friends.”
A pretty pathetic attempt to capitize on the popularity of social networks by cobbling together a bunch of lame applications that students will tire of faster than they get sick of the next rap act.
Hey all, Tim @ Jangl here. I was glad to see TC give some props to College Tonight here, but wanted to clarify a few points about Jangl, too. This is about providing phone numbers for people you “know” inside a social network, and letting them talk, leave vm, and text when you’re not quite yet comfortable swapping real phone numbers. We can already IM and email with pretty much total privacy — now, you can use your phone to do the same. Make sense? Web + phone = good thing. And people use it for different reasons. Some like the fact that their real number can’t be posted on the web’s virtual bathroom wall or abused by an overly-amorous (or intoxicated) individual, others like the SMS or the vm, and others like being able to manage all of that crap online. But the basic idea is: this is your number for HotClassmate19 on College Tonight, and it’s the only number you’ve got (which sort of removes having “foresight” from the equation). For Jangl, it fundamentally works the same way wherever we are, whether in Facebook with the Phonebook app or on some blog somewhere with a CallMe link.
And re CT’s “drunk dial” — we can all have a little fun with this, can’t we? Raise your hand if you never did one. . .esp in college.
Anyway, that’s enough from me. Just wanted to clarify a few things. Now back to our regularly-scheduled grumpiness.
Thanks again.
over it… college tonight sucks. next
tim, i like jangl (truthfully), really dont like college tonight. kind of a weak concept you know. good post john s. oh yeah, coffee man who is mark? your pr guy? haha just kidding. i agree that college tonight does not deserve any facetime… boring (and extremely nerdy) concept for someone who actually parties it up in college. pack your bags college tonight, youre not settling in.
this is awesome! actually really cool….
And by really cool, he means really lame.
Good goin Guys..!!!