About Campus Sphere

I’ve briefly alluded to getting involved with a social networking site in previous posts, but I haven’t yet talked explicitly about it. This post will do just that.

In January of this year, I was approached by a friend who had recently gotten involved with a Social Networking website called theCampusNet at the time. He was one of their programmers. My friend asked me to meet with the team and see if I would be interested in getting involved. Now being a critical skeptic, I immediately assumed this project would be some turnkey networking site or some niche off-shoot of facebook/myspace. Both of which I believe would not be successful. Frankly, the social networking space is a chaotic mess of “web 2.0″ sites who believe they’re offering the next great internet revolution. Its a bunch of marketing jargon with questionable value.

Nonetheless, I wanted to be open-minded and agreed to meet with the team. The next day, I met with the company’s CEO and talked extensively about the social networking space. The conversation was much more robust than I originally imagined. We identified several opportunities that exist for social networks that have yet been addressed by mainstream websites. We also saw significant flaws in current sites that would limit their ability to exploit these opportunities.

The foundation of the site would be to develop a truly exclusive student network for internet-dependent college students with tools and utilities geared toward the college experience (socially and academically). All the applications developed within the network would coincide with the college student’s real life interactions.

Needless to say, I was impressed by our meeting. Since then, I’ve delved further into the realm of social networks and the abundance of startups in this space. There are A LOT of people getting in on this! Hence, the competition is intense and the uncertainty of success does plague this project. But I’ve never been afraid of a challenge =) And this project continues to be a rewarding experience. I get to work with a team of programmers (geeks, haha) in creating a custom social networking platform. Cool stuff!

Well, thats how Campus Sphere (formerly theCampusNet) came into my life. It is partly responsible for my absence on this blog and on Young Money Blog in the past. My bads, haha.

For those of you who care, Campus Sphere is currently in Private Beta and is being tested by students at the University of Florida. We’re limiting access to only UF students during this phase. If you’re a UF Student and would like to participate, send me a quick email at dennis@promoneyblog.com and I’ll hook it up!