doteduguru

Last week one of my friends on Twitter tweeted, “Just added myself to https://campustweet.com  - Ithaca College and Georgetown University.”

My immediate thought — is this another one of those sites that’s going to create buzz most of the day by our circle of common friends and then fade, or could this one actually stick? Lots of friends tweeted questions about it as more and more tweets “Just added myself to ….” came across the stream. The folks at campustweet.com (@campustweet on Twitter) were kind enough send me their e-mail address so I could ask them eight questions about their service. Here’s the interview.

How do you define your purpose? What are your goals with CampusTweet?

Our purpose is to be a place primarily for college students to find other students, alumni, and faculty from their campus who are on Twitter. We kinda like to think of ourselves as Facebook (back when it was just for students or alumni) for Twitter. Since we’re relatively new, our current goal is to make it simple and easy for students to interact with other students who are also using Twitter.

Why do you require a username/password?

We don’t require a new set of username/password for campustweet.We simply use your name and password and Twitter’s oauth login as a way for us to organize the student’s tweets into conversations.

Editors note: She did not address the question/concern that many of my friends expressed.

I see you plan to add a faculty/staff option in addition to student & alum. How does that change your focus?

We did in fact plan to add a faculty option and just released it earlier today.

With our new version of campustweet we are contemplating releasing a “staff” feature but seeing as our aim is towards college students we want to implement features that are advantageous to them.

Canadians are ticked it’s for U.S. only. Do you plan to expand across the border?

We hope our neighbor up north isn’t too upset. We hadn’t planned on taking off so fast!

Right now we’re trying to find a better way to add more Canadian schools and later on down the road, we’d like to add schools globally.

Several schools noted are not being listed on your site. How do they get added?

If a student attempts to join their school and notes that it isn’t listed, we have a ‘My school isn’t here” option for students to add their school. In order to add a school on campustweet, we ask that the students enter their school’s URL. This step ensures that we only have legitimate schools with .edu addresses.

How are you advertising or spreading the word about this site?

Since we are utilizing twitter as our platform for campustweet we’ve found twitter is helpfully in spreading the word, getting, and providing constructive feedback. However we’re not currently thinking about advertising…college students are pretty savvy and know how to tune out advertising. Our approach is a bit more “grassroots” if you can call it that, through twitter we can answer questions and just overall be their support should they need it. And that’s what we like to think students value the most.

Do you see value in campuses adding their accounts? I believe there’s another site for that….

Yes, we do see a lot of value in campuses adding their accounts on twitter. We’re working on a new feature to help schools interact and engage with their students and alumni who are on campustweet. Yet as of right now, few schools actually have a main school twitter account. Some schools main accounts have been added to our site, hopefully, in the future there will be more if not all. (We like to think big)

Are you related to alumtweet.com? How is your service different from that site?

No, we’re not related to alumtweet.com. Alumtweet is a great site to find people from your graduating class from high school. Our focus in on current college students, not connecting alumni with alumni….though you could do that through campustweet.