Students smitten with Sporcle’s quizzes

During the last few weeks of the fall semester, Pitt students weren’t just studying or… During the last few weeks of the fall semester, Pitt students weren’t just studying or checking Facebook, but also using the Internet quiz site Sporcle to test themselves on everything from movie directors to organic chemistry to the Cathedral of Learning’s Nationality Rooms.

Pitt was ranked in the top 15 schools to use the site for several weeks in a row, finishing at No. 13 for the week of Dec. 12-18, ahead of bigger schools like the University of Minnesota and the University of Massachusetts. To get the scoop on Sporcle and its College Ranking System, we talked to its vice president of products, Derek Pharr from Seattle.

Q: Could you briefly describe how Sporcle came together? What was the creation process?

A: Matt Ramme, in Seattle, started the site in 2007. He’s a big New York Times crossword fan, and he wanted to get better at those. [Also] he’d sit down and watch Jeopardy with his wife and I think she was taking him to town a little bit so he put together a tool that would help him relearn some things that he knew but forgot.

He did some looking to see if there was anything out there and he didn’t really like anything he found so he put together this tool and put it up on the Web, and it really resonated with people and took off. The first quiz he put up was “Presidents of the United States” and things have kind of grown from there.

Q: Was there a sense from the beginning that it would appeal so broadly, particularly with college students?

A: It was founded in the place of wanting to educate and wanting to learn more, so of course that really resonates with colleges. We try to appeal to as broad of an audience as we can with education, but we also try to be a site people go to to get away from things. It works well for the college life and for people in the business world as well.

Q: Everything’s connected on the Internet these days, be it through Facebook, Twitter or what have you. Would you look at Sporcle as a form of social media?

A: Social media has, depending on which angle you come at it, kind of this odd connotation. We have a very strong community on our site, and people feel very passionately about it, and we’re trying to build more features around connecting people because people have made connections with the site. I know people have become friends … someone even asked us to add a dating service into Sporcle …  I wouldn’t lump us in with social media, but I’d say there’s definitely a strong community and we really want to foster that.

Q: Could you tell me a little bit about the Sporcle College Ranking System? How did that come about and how is it determined?

A: It’s something we’ve wanted to do for a long time, and we finally got it together in the fall, and we’ve had a really good response to it. We have a formula that tracks the data and we polish it from time to time. It takes into account things like time spent on the site and games played and page views and stuff like that. Another thing that factors in is if you sign up for an account on Sporcle, you can set your college and that helps as well.

Q: The University of Pittsburgh is ahead of much larger schools on the ranking system. Why do you think Pitt has been so strong on the site?

A: The numbers game can always help, but [it’s more complex] since we take into account time spent as well as games played. My hope is that students are using it for study guides and it’s resonating more [in that function]. It’ll be interesting to see in the next few months how things fluctuate.

Q: What’s next for Sporcle?

A: We just put out an Android app that goes along with our iPhone app that we put out last February, and we’ve had a really good response with that. We have more coming for the iPhone world; we want to do more with the college leader board so we have plans to open that up a little bit and improve it … a whole big laundry list of things we want to get into. We want to build on the things we’ve done in the past year and add to them in the next few months.

Q: Is there anything else you’d like to communicate about Sporcle?

A: We feel like we’re in this fairly unique place where yes, we’re this diversionary activity but we’re also an educational activity. Not to sound too hokey, but I feel like we’re in a crossroads where these two things meet on the Web. We hope that people just get into it and go from there.