Every day at the University, a majority of students spend their day procrastinating by visiting the popular social networking Web site Facebook.
But now, a new site is in town to entertain bored University students.
CampusBuddy.com, which was launched on Nov. 19 of this year, is a site designed for students on a college campus.
CampusBuddy offers many different features compared to other social networking sites, such as providing students with information on the grade distribution on campus. Over 80 million grades are able to be accessed by department or overall, according to the site.
Freshman Meghan Slates said she first heard about CampusBuddy in a mass e-mail sent out at the beginning of the year.
“I have a CampusBuddy account because I got an e-mail saying that you could find friends in your classes that lived in dorms near you, and you could learn different things about your professors,” Slates said.
On the University’s home page at CampusBuddy, there is a section called “Bowling Green Answers” where questions about campus life can be answered by students at the University.
The home page also offers different statistics, such as the percentage of applicants admitted every year (88 percent), the percentage of students returning for a second year (76 percent) and the percentage of students in fraternities or sororities (11 percent men, 12 percent women).
However, what truly makes CampusBuddy unique is the start up it had this year. The idea for CampusBuddy came from college students in 2005, including founder and CEO of CampusBuddy, Mike Moradian.
But it appears that on the University campus, CampusBuddy is having a slow start.
While the site has information and grades for over 6,000 colleges worldwide, according to the site, only 468 people at the University have an account on CampusBuddy.
Although freshman Nathan Saygers has an account with CampusBuddy, he said he prefers using the more popular Facebook Web site.
“I probably wouldn’t have even gotten Facebook but I felt a lot of pressure from my friends because it feels like everybody has a Facebook,” Saygers said.
Facebook is the fifth most visited site on the Web according to Alexa, a Web Information Company which tracks traffic at Web sites around the world. It also has over 27,500 people on the Bowling Green network, including alumni, according to Facebook.
“One of the main reasons I like Facebook is for the events application,” Saygers said. “You can see what events are coming up like parties or concerts, and which friends are going. CampusBuddy is more of an academically geared Web site.”
Another reason CampusBuddy has a low number of members is simply because people haven’t heard of it.
Juniors Kyle Fegley and Steve Karns both had never heard of the Web site before.
“It sounds like an interesting site, but I don’t think that I would use it other than to the extent to see what the average GPA of campus is,” Fegley said.
Karns, who does not have an account on any social networking site, agreed.
“I wouldn’t get an account on CampusBuddy because it seems like it would be just like the rest of the social networking sites which I have already avoided,” Karns said.
