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CampusLive Gives Students Real-Time News They Can Use (Video)October 7th, 2008 at 3:30 amSource:Mashable! You know how it goes: it’s the weekend, all your friends are busy with their own affairs, you’re bored and slightly inebriated, and what do you do: you come home and start sending e-mails you’ll later probably regret. Actually, I’m more of an SMS sender with this regard, but regardless of the medium, we all know how bad it feels the morning after when you’re afraid to check out the “sent messages” folder. To fix this, there’s a funny new feature from Gmail Labs. Called Mail Goggles, it activates only late at night (you can, of course, set the time of activation as you please) and over the weekend, and gives you a couple of math problems to solve before your e-mail is sent. Now, although this feature sounds like something you might converse about over a coffee but never actually use, I’m sure that many late night e-mail senders will eventually realize that it’s better to get frustrated with your inability to solve a simple math puzzle than to be sorry the morning after. There is, however, one fundamental flaw with the feature. However drunk I may be, I’m sure I’ll always be able to switch the damn thing off in the settings. For the real deal, you should be required to solve an equally hard math puzzle to be able to switch the feature off, otherwise it won’t stop anyone from sending anything. —Related Articles at Mashable | All That’s New on the Web:New GMail Features Show Up In Some AccountsAOL Mail Updates Include Increased Storage, Maps and Video IntegrationGmail Users are Younger, Richer, Good in BedWill Gmail Morph Into an Online Storage Service?Ymail And Rocketmail? Sorry, Yahoo, But That’s Not Enough to Thwart GmailGmail Going Huge: 9000MB+Yahoo Mail Unlimited Storage: Time to Test the Limits!
CampusLive wants to be a 24/7 RA (Resident Assistant) for college students all across the country by providing real-time information that they can use. For example, students can use the Food Finder feature that lets them find out exactly which restaurants near campus are still open for delivery, take out of dining in. They can read reviews from fellow classmates and even contribute a review of their own and rate the establishment. The home page is customizable and includes a search bar that can search Google, YouTube, CNN and most importantly the local campus area, including a people finder for the school. There’s a weather tracker that shows the local weather as well as other locations that the student selects such as back home. The TV listings feature shows what’s on the local channels. The comparisons to another website that started as a service for college students, Facebook, are inevitable. However, CampusLive makes it clear that they don’t want to compete with Facebook but rather work with them. They’ve even gone as far as to integrate with Facebook so that students can actually see their live Facebook messages from their CampusLive homepage. There are plans to do the same with other social networks that are popular with students such as MySpace and LinkedIn. The news feed is customizable so that members can display the news that they want to see first. They can include local, national and international news feeds. There’s also a QuickLinks feature that shows the most popular links on campus in an at-a-glance display. CampusLive started in uMass and currently covers campuses in nine states and 26 universities and growing. There’s no question that this service does provide useful information for student in a timely manner. They need to continue to focus on adding more schools and more customizable features that allows students to build their own virtual dorm room on their site. The trick will be to convince everyone that they aren’t trying to another Facebook or social network which would surely get them a failing grade. If they can accomplish all that then they will pass with honors.
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