Univillage, which launched officially on August 16th, is the first
social networking site aimed squarely at UK university (equivalent of US college) students - pretty clearly, it’s trying to be the UK’s
Facebook. The service is available to those with a ac.uk email address, but you can sign up with any address for the first few weeks. The reason for that - and the choice of launch date - is that English high school students received their results last week. New students can now network well in advance of Fresher’s Week, where they would normally meet for the first time. The site was co-founded by Henry Yates and Andrew Needham, and Univillage’s non-exec director is Brent Hoberman, founder of the travel site lastminute.com.
I took it for a spin last week, and it’s an impressive platform. There are profile pages, university-based networks, the ability to add friends, groups, forums, blogging, events, photo uploading and integration with
Yahoo Messenger. You can also customize your profile by editing the color scheme and fonts or grabbing a ready-made skin from the gallery (unlike with
MySpace layouts, there’s no ability to add custom css). A calendar and address book are also included.
But perhaps one of the smartest moves has been to include a music section - Univillage has partnered with Universal, EMI, Warner, SonyBMG and some independent labels to provide music, concert information and tickets from artists like Coldplay, Gorillaz and Kylie Minogue. The setup is the same as MySpace Music and recently-launched
Bebo Bands - musicians have their own profile pages, and you can grab any track to add to your own page. Tracks can also be bought straight from the Flash player. To complete the feature set, Univillage also supports video uploading, and just like rival
Bebo, the feature is powered by VideoEgg. Alernatively, you can post videos from
YouTube or
Google Video.
It seems this idea could get real traction - the company claims that every UK university student has been notified of the launch, which could lead to massive uptake. The UK lacks a direct Facebook equivalent, but Bebo, a cross between MySpace and Facebook, is probably Univillage’s strongest rival.
MySpace also has good uptake, and the ability to find friends based on schools.
Nonetheless, I think Univillage is hitting the university demographic much harder than its rivals - it seems inevitable that it will be a big hit.
The MySpace economy continues to blossom. MyChingo is a service for posting audio comments to MySpace, Blogger and social networks - you can see a demo here. The free account allows your visitors to leave a message of up to 2 minutes, while the paid account extends the limit to 30 minutes for $3.95/month or $45/year.
The comment recorder is pretty basic, but offers some customization options - like changing the color, title and background image. There are also RSS feeds for your audio comments and email notifications when a new message is left. Unsurprisingly, they’re seeing lots of use from podcasters and radio stations, with a handful of players popping up on MySpace so far. The service is the work of a developer Michael Bailey, based in Independence, Missouri. Michael plans to merge MyChingo with his MobaTalk comments system later this year.
MyChingo isn’t pretty, and the feature set isn’t complex, but I think it’s a neat idea. However, it feels like one of those side projects that might not be around forever - podcasting service Odeo has a similar audio comments feature that will likely be more reliable. A number of other services have sprung up in this space, too - SayNow is enables MySpace musicians to accept cellphone messages from their fans, while Snapvine provides a similar service for the average user. Related services from EQO and Supcast allow the page owner to dial in their own voice messages. MyChingo may have proven the concept, but well-funded startups will probably take this ball and run with it.
