UCLA Student Media’s bruinwalk.com launched a new
“groups” feature for its social networking tool this
quarter that will allow students to not only form online networking
groups, but to create entire web pages and publish content without
any technical programming experience.
Justin Hartung, a recently graduated business economics student
and the director of bruinwalk.com, said the new feature, launched
April 8, will make it very simple for student groups and campus
organizations to communicate and organize events online.
“The group functionality allows groups to really form an
online community and either organize themselves, message to one
another, or publish information,” Hartung said.
“You no longer have to rely on one technical person to
keep your Web site up to date, which I know is a huge issue for a
lot of clubs,” he said.
Hartung said the groups feature on bruinwalk.com is much more
useful than the one on thefacebook.com, a popular social networking
site, because it allows users to both publish information and
control who can view the page, publish content, submit content, or
change the look of the page.
“What I find is that The Facebook, while it’s a
great tool, can only help you find people and do some very coarse
organization such as sending messages,” Hartung said.
“What we focus on is really creating tools for people to
publish information, to publish data, to organize their groups and
maintain their communications,” he added.
Using the new system, a group’s administrators can choose
to make the group visible to invited members only, to all
registered bruinwalk.com users, or to all Internet users. If they
choose to make it universally accessible, the Web site will be
indexed by Google so that Internet users can reach it through a
simple search.
Student Media Director Arvli Ward called the system an important
part of Student Media’s ultimate goal ““ to give
students publishing power. Student Media also publishes the Daily
Bruin.
“In a day and age when a changing … local and campus
economy make it impossible for us to give people print
publications, I think we meet our mission with a platform like
this,” Ward said.
Because bruinwalk.com has not yet started promoting the
site’s new capabilities, most of the publicly visible groups
so far are online versions of Student Media organizations, such as
UCLA Radio or FEM, a student-run feminist magazine.
Other clubs, like the Student Coalition for Marriage Equality,
which works to build support for legalizing same-sex marriage in
California, have not joined bruinwalk.com, but use a Facebook group
and separate Web site to manage their online communication.
Gabriel Rose, a first-year political science student and the
president of the coalition, had not heard about the new groups
feature but said he would be interested in trying it.
Darren Chan, internal vice president of the Undergraduate
Students Association Council, also said the new feature seemed like
a good tool for student groups, but added that it would have to
compete with The Facebook as a major method of online
communication.
“I’m an RA in Saxon and most of my residents all
have a Facebook profile, so I opened up a group for my residents
and I use that to get in touch with them,” Chan said.
“I think it is a pretty efficient medium to communicate.
But if (bruinwalk.com) is something that’s comparable, I
would consider it,” he added.
Chan said the new bruinwalk.com groups are less useful right now
because they don’t have the same popularity as The Facebook,
making it hard to reach many students.
“I think that once they actually publicize it,
they’ll get a lot of use out of it,” he said.
Ward said as of Wednesday, bruinwalk.com had just passed 15,000
users but only about one-fifth of those users have profiles on the
social networking feature.
An estimate of the number of UCLA students on The Facebook was
not available, but Ward emphasized that a direct comparison between
the two sites was not necessarily important, as bruinwalk.com
offers additional features The Facebook does not.
“The Facebook is a kind of thing where people are electing
to go on and fill out profiles; they’re there for
that,” Ward said.
“But there are a lot of people who prefer (bruinwalk.com)
as a method to pick up their e-mail. … It’s sort of an
apples to oranges comparison.”