Roots of Facebook
In the early years of Facebook, it was something that was bonded for the usage of one college. At the initial stages of Facebook, the area of usage was limited by the founders to Harvard students but was expanded to other colleges in the Boston area. And after this, they expanded their area to most of the universities in the region of the United States and Canada. So basically Facebook thought to bring back their roots to the limelight.
Connecting a College
Specifically for connecting with classmates and joining campus events and groups, Facebook Inc. will soon let college students create special profiles. So basically it is bringing those days back of Facebook when it was exclusive to college students after Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg founded the social network in his Harvard dorm.
How will it work?
Facebook Campus is the new product which will be part of the company’s existing service, using their university email address provided users must create a special profile. This will help students to join groups, find campus events, and participate in classroom discussions and special feature is that it would be visible only to other students at their college.
Charmaine Hung, a Facebook product manager overseeing the effort said that the idea is to give students a ‘private, dedicated space to interact with their college life’. Profiles can include information like a student’s major, what classes they’re taking, and which dorm they live in. She added that Facebook aimed for its users to add information and more specifically related to their specific college but most of the users were not interested to put this information on their main Facebook profile.
In pandemic connect with college, not world
Hung said that to stay connected with classmates Facebook’s product will help students who aren’t actually living at school and others at the many colleges and universities for protection against the spread of Covid-19 using full- or part-time remote learning.
Beginning this Thursday, the product is launching for 30 colleges and universities which includes Duke University, Northwestern University, and Virginia Tech.
Facebook tries best to get Information
Facebook is getting bigger and has added plenty of features already, but it stills has been pursuing users toward more intimate ways to share their information including groups and messages. So basically Facebook is not trying to create profiles specifically for the first time but last September, Facebook launched a dating feature in the U.S. by asking users to create dating-specific profiles as a way to keep their dating life separate from their broader Facebook network.
User Demand
People want a smaller Facebook according to the interest of users. This new model of Facebook Campus will also help the algorithm of Facebook to stay relevant to college-age users. In recent years, the popularity among teens of the network has reduced. Although a strong following among young people has been maintained by the company’s Instagram photo-sharing service. Hung said that Instagram isn’t currently involved in Facebook Campus, but in the future could be included in some way.