Colleges Using Facebook to help students find roommates via Facebook? Looking beyond gaming…
Ran across this in my daily reading…
Colleges Use Facebook to Let Freshmen Find Their Own Roommates LINK to article
By Sophia Li
This summer, incoming freshmen at five universities can use a Facebook application to find their roommates. Students can use the application, RoomBug, to fill out forms about their preferences for living and qualities they’d like to see in a roommate. Students can then request a match, which the other incoming freshman must confirm.
RoomBug is hardly the first service to let students match themselves: Tulane University announced a partnership with online service RoommateClick two years ago.
But RoomBug, which the company U-Match LLC just rolled out at Emory University, the University of Florida, Temple University, Wichita State University, and William Paterson University of New Jersey, tries to go where the students are.
“Everyone is on Facebook,” says Robert Castellucci, the service’s co-founder and sales director.
Over a quarter of the University of Florida’s incoming freshmen have added the Facebook application, he says, but numbers on how many matches the service helped make are not yet available.
My thoughts…
I like that Roombug is taking this across all the channels of room hunting. They have a version each…1). The University housing department 2) The OffCampus students to by-the-room 3) Apartment owners/locators referral service and 4) Direct for the students
Fishing where the fish are! By utilizing Facebook RoomBug can take advantage of existing profile information and data. Students can really find out more about prospective roomies via their Facebook pages than a single interview. This also can make it less awkward to pass over or reject. Wonder if this opens up the discrimination conversation…here comes the ACLU(yes, I saw the Equal Housing logo). I can hear it now, “I didn’t get that apartment because I am less digital than other people!”
This is great for Facebook! They can tap into the college crowd…at least those who have not already signed up!
The Gowalla CEO was a no-show in front of an large audience expecting a heated debate with FourSquare co-founder Dennis Crowley. This was a big mistake to leave 100+ iphone toting twitter-heads waiting and wondering. Mr. Crowley definitely stole the show and I overheard many of the attendees were pondering the demise of their Gowalla application.