Get ready for a whole new way for students to get in trouble. Bringing back the days of the DailyJolt chat rooms, there’s a new website being rolled out today that is aiming to make social networking a lot more anonymous.
It’s called HowRandom and is a simply chatroom where someone with a .edu e-mail address can go and represent their school online. There’s very little authentication other than someone having a .edu address. There’s no photo uploading, file sharing or video capabilities, just a text entry line and a chat widget.
The student on student communication happens on two levels, a test function where you casually enter in your school (warning, you have to type the full word “University”) and a verified function which allows you to type in your .edu address in order to get “Verified” as a bona fide college student.
Why It Will Fail
As someone who is pretty familiar with how conversations go on anonymous chat boards, it’s pretty obvious to see where this is going. The chats are going to quickly devolve into racist, homophobic, and downright mean rants against schools from faceless people supposedly from another school.
Think an Ivy League student won’t go into a Community College chatroom and mock them? What about the other way around? It’s only a matter of time that people are frustrated and ultimately give up on HowRandom. However, it’s an interesting experiment at the very least.
Here’s a screenshot of a conversation via TechCrunch. (This is most likely never going to happen on HowRandom.)
How It Works
Explains founder Jon Cook, “It’s a way for guys at Harvard to meet girls at Yale, etc. And it’s not intrusive. HowRandom has a very solid viral loop. It has the Facebook-like .edu exclusivity. And it’s extremely simple to use.”
Cook and co-founder Jason Humphries think of HowRandom as more of a social experiment than a business. They hope it will mirror the randomness of life and “foster real-world meetings and interactions between two people that might otherwise never meet. ”
Like a text-based Chatroulette with no penis problem, there’s also a next feature in case you don’t like who you’re chatting with.
Cook says he wants to keep evolving the app through user feedback, and is considering including limited profile option along with the “Verified” logo.
Facebook initially restricted its users to college students with .edu addresses and that element was crucial to its success, this is also HowRandom’s hook. Colleges are hotbeds of virality in more ways than one, and starting off there is a good move for any social app.
Source: TechCrunch
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