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.

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This isn’t really going public, though. They’ve merged with a barely alive public entity called Simex Technologies (SMXT), which is trading at $0.49 per share on the Nasdaq pink sheets. Simex, which had been delinquent in its annual and quarterly reports for some time, is now current and has changed its name to College Tonight, Inc.

This is a common way for startups to get liquidity fast, and it rarely ends well. When Nasdaq companies get delisted into pink sheet purgatory, they will occasionally get picked up.

A subsidiary of Simex called Remote Business, Inc. used to be “engaged in the design, installation, servicing and monitoring of digital surveillance security systems for business and industry” — hardly anything related to social networking.

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While Alice Mathias may have overplayed the frivolous uses of Facebook for college students in her article called The Fakebook Generation published in the Grey Lady a few weeks ago, she was certainly correct in saying that Facebook lost a certain je ne sais quoi for students when it opened up to the real world last fall.

So instead of trying to take this $15 billion animal head on, as one $222 billion beast is attempting to do, startups might be wise to try capturing the niche that Facebook has intentionally left behind. Of course, there are a handful of reasons to think there will never be another social network that catches on so quickly and so thoroughly with college students. Namely, Facebook itself, which still holds the attention of the vast majority of college students. Personally, I think any company that tries to create a social network for college students faces a very steep uphill battle. But you can’t blame them for trying.

Let’s say you did want to capitalize on students’ (growing?) discontent with the “mature” Facebook; what strategy would you follow? You’d probably want to take a few pages out of Facebook’s own, er, book by restricting membership to users with .edu email addresses, gradually opening up to elite schools, and keeping things stupidly simple. But you’d also have to provide something particularly unique, useful, or entertaining that tempts mainstream Facebook users to jump ship.

We’ve taken a look at the websites out there claiming that they are the next “it” social network for college students. And we’ve got to say: overall, we’re not terribly impressed. Only one stands out – a website called College Tonight – and this because of its novel attempt to bring social networking back into the real world. College Tonight is well-designed and has some features you won’t find in other social networks, such as an area for lost and found items at your school and a place to “drunk dial” with messages you can take back in the morning (if you’re up and out of bed in time). The company behind this site, which launches Monday, also has a set of undisclosed features in the works that tempt us into believing that they might actually appeal enough to college students to survive. We’ll have to write more about them later once we’re more informed.

The other decent site among the bunch is Carmun, a site that encourages students to help each other study. Students post questions they have about essays and tests the are studying for, and others hypothetically help them find the answers and information they need. While the site is attractive enough, I don’t see many students helping other students with the homework no one wants to do.

The rest of them are either really badly designed, ghost towns, gimmicks, or abandoned by their owners (plus, most don’t require .edu addresses to register so what’s the point?). Let’s take a look:

ConnectU – This site was created by the very same Harvard students currently in court with Facebook over whether or not Mark Zuckerberg stole their code. It’s poorly designed, not very functional, and doesn’t look like it’s been updated significantly for a long time.

CollegeHotList – An NYU project that has not yet launched…and probably will never launch (I’ve seen talk on the internet about it that dates back to early 2006).

PlayboyU – A social network built on Ning but branded by Playboy that has only 5,000-some members after launching on August 22. The whole thing feels like a gimmick, and many of the profiles appear to be fake (there’s no way that many attractive people signed up on their own). There’s very little value added by its association with Playboy.

CampusMatch – A romantically-themed college social network that dates back quite a few years and is almost certainly abandoned. It’s too bad too, because a college network with a focus on love/hooking up has a lot of potential.

CampusGrind – This one has a cluttered design and serves more as an information center for teens, with its advice columns, than a true social network.

CampusBug – A site overwhelmed by its sponsorships and overloaded with educational tools like a bibliography creator and flashcards.

CampusCentral – It’s not a good sign when the copyright at the bottom of your pages says 2005. This one’s a ghost town, and tailored to Canadian students, too.

CrushTV – This one’s filled mostly with video and photographic content provided by the site itself. While having videos of babes in bikinis will draw some eyeballs, don’t expect many college students to stay too long.

LifeAtCollege – Awful, awful design.

College.com – Packed with too many extraneous features like sections for news, academics, and greek life. Plus, who wants to rate their professors in their social network?

Uspot – Launched in early 2006…now says “We’ll be back shortly…” on homepage. Not good.

So there you have it. Now who’s going to step up to the plate and give college students an attractive alternative to Facebook? As you can see, you won’t have much competition aside from maybe College Tonight. So get on it, my collegiate friends.

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