Facebook Faces Up

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Pep Squad

Given the specificity of the information that will be contained within each blog thread, Imbruce also promises the sites will remain exclusive to each college. "We're looking to create college sites," he says. "We may add more content, sports scores, and news, but we will stay vertical within these communities."

Student-exclusive networks provide users with a sense of importance: It's easy to become a big fish in a small, students-only pond. Emory University alumus Zach Suchin hopes to capitalize on this desire. His venture, CollegeTonight.com, will establish distinct networks for each U.S. college, where students can post information about parties, concerts, and social events, download contact lists to their mobile phones, and make plans to meet up. In September, CollegeTonight will launch a nine-month nightlife tour of 129 sponsored events at colleges across the country. Business partners already include car manufacturer Subaru and CBS (CBS), which will sponsor the concerts and parties on the tour in the hope of reaching Suchin's user base.

Suchin proposes the site as a tool chiefly for "the trendsetters and the tastemakers" and, notably, wealthy students with disposable income (the tour begins at Ivy League schools Yale and Brown). And it's actively promoting a sense of exclusivity and privacy. Former FBI profiler John Douglas crafted the site's privacy settings and users must have a .edu e-mail to join. "That will never change." Suchin says. "We're trying to create the sense of community that Facebook abandoned."

Weaning Away From Facebook

As it turns out, for now at least, students are loath to leave the network that still dominates online socializing. "Facebook has such a strong hold on the college social networking market that people are [still] interested in developing things for Facebook," explains Joe DiPasquale, founder of CollegeWikis.com. He hopes to strike a balance by creating college-specific sites with a widget that links to Facebook.

On CollegeWikis.com, students can e-mail questions about local restaurants, classes, and dorm life. Each question and e-mailed response from other students becomes instant content on the Wikipedia-style Web site, a viral format that DiPasquale believes students are more likely to use than mass administrative e-mails, which most students simply delete. Since its launch in April, CollegeWikis has expanded to 60 schools nationwide and achieved 15% penetration at some campuses.

Meanwhile, on CollegeWikis.com's sponsored Facebook application, SuperWall, users post college-specific information that is instantly communicated to the virtual message walls of other registered users at their college. SuperWall is currently one of Facebook's 10 most popular applications.

Room for Everyone

Again, the appeal of CollegeWikis.com is its specificity. A site is created for any college if a student submits a request to the central wiki page. Within that wiki, users can join or create lists for their major, their class, and their dorm. Already the average college wiki page has 216 more-specific lists. Says DiPasquale, "When we did focus groups, we found people wanted the sites as specific as they could be."

DiPasquale's dual approach to advertising and site sponsorship—be authentic, be transparent—epitomizes these niche networks' business model. Young consumers are expert multi-taskers so there is room for multiple offerings within their expanding online life. These three young entrepreneurs hope their offerings will complement one another and Facebook, creating more business for all of them. Says CollegeOTR.com's Imbruce, "Media in this group [are] additive and not really competitive." Though he's talking about college students, the insight applies to online business overall.

Maha Atal is an intern at BusinessWeek.