Make some Dormnoise

The ink had barely dried on his diploma when the Facebook friend requests began queuing up on… The ink had barely dried on his diploma when the Facebook friend requests began queuing up on Jay Rodrigues’ account. High school teachers and middle school students he used to tutor numbered among his friends from class and the neighborhood. ‘That was awkward,’ said Rodriques. ‘People know Facebook, and they know what it’s about. They know if you put them on limited profile.’ ‘ ‘ ‘ ‘ ‘ ‘ ‘ ‘I didn’t know what my life was gonna be like [in college]. I didn’t know how much of what I do I wanted them to see.’ And then the idea for DormNoise.com, a social networking site that opened to the public just over two weeks ago, popped into Rodrigues’s head. DormNoise.com, said Rodrigues, who’s now a sophomore at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business, boasts a calendar system unlike those found on other networking sites. The site features both a campus calendar and a calendar for each student group that signs up. Users can save their favorite events to their personal calendars. Pitt senior Dustin Stirpe, who’s friends with Rodrigues and helped to pass out nearly 1,700 DormNoise.com T-shirts on Pitt’s campus, said the site ‘kinda goes back to Facebook’s roots.’ It’s not crowded with extra applications. ‘ Users can message their friends or write on their Whiteboard, which is similar to a Facebook wall. Every user can create a personal profile and access AOL Instant Messenger accounts via the site. ‘ DormNoise.com is different in that it’s only open to college undergraduates. All new users must submit their college e-mail address and agree to a statement saying that if they aren’t undergraduates, they’ll pay a $10,000 fine. Rodrigues said his legal team will hold those who violate the site’s terms of agreements accountable. ‘My site is a place I want people to feel comfortable, secure and in an intimate setting,’ said Rodrigues. Sites like Facebook, he added, are open to people of all ages and thus sometimes attract people who may cause trouble. DormNoise.com, he said, is open only to college undergraduates. Rodrigues said he recently received an e-mail from a Pitt student who said she likes the fact that the site was only open to undergraduates. He declined to give her name because he did not know her. ‘You can create personal events that can be ‘hellip; the type of event you can share with the college world but may not want to share with the rest of the world,’ said Rodrigues. Other students weren’t as happy with the site’s exclusivity. Sophomore Corey Cramer, who said he hasn’t visited the site but probably would, said he thought the $10,000 fine for non-undergraduates was a little extreme. ‘I just think anybody should be able to use it,’ he said. Junior Diana Fisher said she has both Facebook and MySpace accounts but would be reluctant to check out DormNoise.com. ‘I’m not really into the whole campus scene,’ she said. ‘I’m most interested in checking out what’s going on around the city. Oakland is like its own incestuous community.’ But other students were willing to embrace the idea behind DormNoise.com. Sophomore Joe Bosh said he hadn’t heard of the Web site but would probably be willing to give it a shot. He was looking for ‘anything to distract me.’