Since November, I’ve been working on Dormlink, a social network for dorms that enables residents to connect in a more useful and private way than any other social networking site does. Alex and I came up with the idea while trying to find a good solution for dorm websites (in a somewhat reminiscent fashion to how Firefly Solutions began). Its primary strength lies in its dorm-centric-ness (yes, that’s a word), making people feel more comfortable to share and open up than on (for example) Facebook. So far we’ve applied to the BASES 150k challenge and sought the counsel of some really awesome people. If this gets big, Dormlink will be my first start-up. That’s a somewhat scary thought.
For the techies, it was written in PHP/MySQL and made use of jQuery and the Google Maps API.
Check it out! http://dormlink.me/. So far we’ve only released it to two dorms at Stanford, but you can sign in on the demo account to see what it’s like on the inside.
I don’t have too much time now to do an in-depth blog post on it, so here’s a feature list (some items are yet to be implemented).
Corkboard
RAs often create forms and surveys online and try to get people to fill them in. The current mechanism for getting responses involves simply repeatedly spamming everyone via the mailing list. The surveys aren’t aggregated anywhere so residents tend to lose track of them and there’s no easy way to find out who hasn’t filled in a form.
We solve this with our ‘corkboard’ feature, an integrated mailing list that combines the best of both Facebook groups and email lists, builds upon it. Here, you can sharem comment on and ‘like’ text, pictures and links. With surveys and forms, when an RA links to a SurveyMonkey form (for example), each resident will get that added to their list of surveys to complete and tick off items as they’re completed. The survey poster can then get a list of people who haven’t filled out the form.
People
You can get a list of residents of your dorm. Further, when you register, you enter your room number and you and your roommate get your own webpage. On this page there is a whiteboard on which other people can doodle.
You can also add your classes and major to your profile and find people with whom you share classes and majors. You can then contact the entire group to (for example) arrange a study session.
Stuff
The stuff page is where you can post things you want to sell / lend to others within your dorm. Since the only people with whom you are allowed to interact are people in your dorm, you save yourself having to go into commercial transactions with strangers.
Calendar
Dormlink has Google Calendar integration so if your dorm has a calendar, you can add it to Dormlink.
Places
You can share places of interest with other people in your dorm on an interactive map. I stayed up till 3am implementing this, learning the Google Maps API on the fly.
Projects
We’re considering renaming this to ‘workspaces.’ Here, you can create your own social workspace based on a theme of your choice. This is probably best explained through our archetypal example of dreams: you create a project called ‘dreams’ and post in the description something like ‘post your most interesting dreams.’ People can post, comment and vote on dreams, then sort the entries by popularity to get a list of the top ten dreams of all time. We’re considering extending the functionality of this to other things to enable collaborative workspaces, notes sharing and elections.
That really wasn’t that brief; I should stop doing this whole obsessive writing thing… Oh well, definitely check it out – and watch this space!
Oh yeah, the Stanford Daily also ran an article on it which was pretty awesome. It’s the first result on Google for ‘granola bar stanford daily’ :P
