Weinstein ’09 creates CollegeOnly, a social networking site targeted at college students

Last month, Weinstein launched CollegeOnly.com, the latest in a line of social networking websites he has created exclusively for college students that combines many features of his previous projects.

CollegeOnly emulates some of Facebook’s most popular features, with a few additions. The main page, called Campus Pulse, has a comment stream for an entire campus that allows anonymous posts. There are also tabs for pages called Overheard, Questions and Answers, Events and Missed Connections, as well as a stream of random photos. The Chatroom section allows users to text and video chat, either with a randomly paired student or through groups that students can create or join.

Students in the Ivy League could start using an initial version of the site in late August, and its official launch is slated for Oct. 2. Only users with “.edu” e-mail addresses can access the website, in an effort to restrict access for parents and employers.

“We tried to look at what wasn’t currently offered on Facebook, both in terms of privacy and features,” Weinstein said, adding that, “We’re sort of a pure Facebook.”

Ryan Shea ’12, who worked out of the same office as Weinstein on a separate project while Weinstein was developing the site, said he thinks that CollegeOnly has the potential to catch on.

“No other social networking site offers this level of privacy and sense of community,” Shea said.

Weinstein said he learned in focus groups that Facebook users were wary of posting pictures because of privacy concerns, even though photo-sharing was originally one of the site’s most popular features. CollegeOnly lets users post photos and comment anonymously.

“Unlike Mark Zuckerberg, Josh realizes that social interaction is based on trust and context,” Joseph Perla ’09, who is advising CollegeOnly on strategy and development, said in an e-mail, referring to the founder of Facebook. “You are a fundamentally different person to a potential employer than you are to your girlfriend. CollegeOnly lets college students be college students, whereas we have to be careful about what we say and do on Facebook.”

Missed Connections and video chat should be familiar features to students who used GoodCrush.com or RandomDorm.com, two of Weinstein’s earlier creations. GoodCrush, which Weinstein created while USG president, allowed college students to send their crushes anonymous e-mails. If two people sent each other e-mails, they would be matched by the website and encouraged to go on a date. RandomDorm allowed users to chat with strangers, but unlike the similar website ChatRoulette.com, it was restricted to college students.

Weinstein said that he originally planned to create a network of websites targeted toward college students but ultimately decided to combine them.

“GoodCrush was very successful and the Missed Connections was very popular, but we think the more general form of a full social networking page will be much more useful,” he said.

Perla said he considers Facebook to be a “social utility,” serving a different role from Weinstein’s new site. “CollegeOnly will be how you have fun, meet your soul mate and remember your favorite times at your alma mater,” he said.

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CollegeOnly received $1.15 million in funding, and the list of investors includes Peter Thiel, the co-founder of PayPal and an early Facebook investor.

“It is quite difficult to get such a prominent investor, let alone one that invested in the largest social network in the world and the basis of comparison for all social networks to come,” Shea said. He is also director of competitions for the Princeton Entrepreneurship Club.

But Shea also noted that CollegeOnly needs to set itself apart from its numerous competitors. FountainHop and Scoop, two other start-ups in the social networking market, also launched at Princeton this fall.

Weinstein said he has been relying on user feedback and continued improvements to try to put CollegeOnly at the forefront of the social networking scene. He noted that he now plans to develop mobile and event functions for the site.

“The feature set that we want to have is there — chat, the comment stream and the photostream,” Weinstein said. “Now we need to make it a bit more intuitive from the user interface perspective.”