« Flattery will get you everywhere | Main | Amazon S3? »
February 20, 2007
Campus Cupid Redux 
In February 2000 I unveiled the prototype of Campus Cupid.
It was the first internet project I produced. I concepted/designed it, and my friend Michael Lieberman coded the whole damn thing for me during his spare time one week.
It was a great idea, born of a drunken 1999 pre-winter-break promise : harness the power of the internet and all those stupid 'secret admirer' messages into something tangible. Something called.. the Booty party.
Our system was simple: students would visit an online website where they would list between 1 and 20 crushes (20? yes 20. the keyword was 'booty'). The pool of people one could crush on was limited to the database of Pomona students ( keyed by student id , cross referenced by name + campus email ). I used my influence with the programming board to have the school sponser a valentines day party with 5 kegs and 1000 condoms. The day before the party, we printed out Crush Sheets - sheets with a listing of all your reciprocal crushes and the number of people who had a crush on you. People could claim the sheets at the party for $1 , and we crowned a Crush King and Crush Queen as we publicized the top 10 most crushed on people. If I recall correctly, 95% of the campus participated.
I graduated that Spring with grand plans of making CampusCupid a commercial venture. No luck - conservative schools didn't like the idea at all, liberal schools couldn't agree on a price point. A deal almost happened with a co-worker trying to broker a deal between me and his old frat house at Florida State -- but they decided to put the money towards better use : a stripper pole in their living room.
Michael was still at Pomona and tried to do it again, using the new improved CampusCupid name. He was overextended and couldn't get the system working right - I believe he was trying to let people narrow down their crushes by using their dorms and first names , and I was helping him with some compatibilty matching stuff based on quizzes. Unfortunately, from what I heard the second party wasn't all that great.
In any event, today my friend Bob sent me a link -- apparently Princeton 'came up' with their own student crush service, and is quite eager to boast about it: http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/archive/2007/02/20/1726882.aspx
I'm kind of surprised by this new system-- in the amazing world of Web 2.0 and all the new technological achievements of the past 7 years, I'd expect the next student crush thing to completely floor me. Instead it just seems (at best) on par with what we did.
Then again, they're just Princeton, and we went to Pomona :)
Posted by Jonathan at February 20, 2007 6:08 PM
Comments
Post a comment
Thanks for signing in, . Now you can comment. (sign out)
(If you haven't left a comment here before, you may need to be approved by the site owner before your comment will appear. Until then, it won't appear on the entry. Thanks for waiting.)