Most college students rely on interaction with friends and roommates to keep stress at a distance. Almost every day they ask: What’s happening on campus this week, or where is the party at tonight?
To answer these questions, students today also depend on their social media network connections.
Sharing and tweeting are now hourly routines for teens and adults alike. In college, it is how a student may contact a member of a group project, introduce themselves to someone for the first time, or more importantly, how they converse with friends and followers about hot topics or special events on and off campus.
However, popular sites such as Facebook only allow members to attend or respond to events that are posted by their subscribed friends. This could be a problem for someone who has a limited amount of proactive friends and continually wants to know when and where events are happening on campus.
A new website created last year could help someone do just that.
Qwicklr.com, brought to the public’s attention by a Virginia college student, is a new social networking website that serves as an online bulletin board for college occasions. With Qwicklr, members can both search for and create events.
In a press release from November of 2011, Qwicklr creators argued that sometimes school organizations have a difficult time promoting their events because of students’ busy schedules.
On Qwicklr, and through its smart-phone application recently created, students can now search for events just as easy as logging into their other social networking sites.
The site’s design allows students to find details of rush events, parties, sporting events, concerts and any other gatherings available. Information on a particular event can be looked up by a keyword, the type of experience it relates to or by the name of the university that is hosting it. An event can also be searched by past or upcoming events.
So far, colleges listed on Qwicklr are from the neighboring states New York, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Virginia and Maryland. Schools already posting on Qwicklr include Virginia Tech, Virginia Commonwealth University and Temple University.
Like other sites, Qwicklr members can add friends and create a profile. The difference in this site is its connection capability with other colleges. When creating an event on Qwicklr, members have the option to make it public or private.
Being private allows members to create an event with their friends, and public allows them to post an event to their school’s page.
For instance, if a Virginia Tech member searches for an event under Shippensburg University, any public occasion that was created by an SU student will appear. Once attending an event, members can choose to flag the event, comment, or change their present status.
Signing up for Qwicklr is free and will continue to be cost-free according to regional vice president Preston Davis. Qwicklr employees believe revenue generation might eventually include the use of targeted ads such as those featured on Twitter and other social media sites.
Although Qwicklr inventors claim that their site makes event searching easy for busy college students, the question of who and what individuals will have enough time to post on Qwicklr comes to mind. Qwicklr could be a great way for sorority and fraternity leaders to get word out faster of their events. This could also benefit college sports teams that want more fan support at their events.
Will Qwicklr become the great college party search engine that its makers hope it to be?
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