The beta is up! Students can sign up at http://beta.lymabean.com.

Props to Steve Champlin at Pinto Bean for sending over this video. It's all too appropriate.

St. Patrick's Day is a good one for us at the Bean. It's not too hard to wear green when you have a dresser full of green Lymabean shirts. We've been celebrating it all week… and we might extend it to next week, too.

Things have been busy around here, and the blog's been a little dry, so here's an update.

• We have a great batch of students beta testing the site as we speak… and it's going fantastic. We're looking at making the beta public the week of April 7th! Mark your calendars. We'll still be adding other features over the next few months leading up to our fall semester launch, but for now it's great to get students in and using the site.
• We've added a new page to Behind the Bean, with avatar-sized images of all the college Bean logos that have been made (this Notre Dame Bean is one of my faves). And if we don't have your school, let us know and we'll get to it as soon as we can. The page is here: http://www.behindthebean.com/downloadable/
• We've just gotten a huge boon to our staff by bringing on Garrett Fuller, to head the local business development and advertising model. We're pretty stoked for the things he's doing already.
• Western Kentucky just upset Drake, which is going to help my March Madness brackets a lot. Ossem.

And that's about it.

This article came up the other day, in the Register (from the UK):

'Facebook fatigue' kicks in as people tire of social networks

Saving you a click-through and a read, it's about how time spent on social networking pages is dropping off. There's an announcement that's not a surprise. The original question, that has again come in to play, is: What in the world are you supposed to do on social networks?

And I'm the market! I joined Facebook as a college student! I have a profile, and I check it  quite a few times a day (maybe 10? maybe more? I should count, but I'm afraid of the number). I can tell you with certainty how long my visits last, though. I typically hit the site, see that I don't have anything new, and then go somewhere else. Estimated time: 4 seconds.

I'm not much of a browser/voyeur/stalker, so I don't often go looking for new stuff on Facebook. Basically, my usage of Facebook has funneled down to responding when someone sends me a message, occasionally wishing someone a happy birthday, and rejecting invitations for applications.

Speaking of applications - they were supposed to change the way we use Facebook. They were supposed to add all sorts of functionality and active participation to the site. But they don't, for the most part… 99% of the applications that I come across are strictly social in nature (werewolves, secret crushes, super walls, etc. etc.), and don't add any utility to the site for me. If you visit my profile, you'll notice that I have one application - a thing that adds a quote from The Office to my profile. Because I like the Office. And that's it.

I think the above-linked article goes a bit too far - I don't see this as being the death of social networks, any more than email has died. What it means, though, is that the current leaders in social networking are in danger of being one-upped by networks that offer some actual utility.

(Insert plug for Lymabean here)

So I’m showing the demo to a friend of mine the other day, pretty tech saavy dude. It was obviously well received, with responses like “HOLY CRAP!! ARE YOU KIDDING ME??” and “this is…, I mean…, seriously…, c’mon”. His moist poignant (yes, I said poignant) statement was something like “There’s so much to do, I could spend days in here and feel like there’s still more.” This statement brings up a couple good points:

1.    There IS more to do in Lymabean.com than anybody is used to – but it’s quicker and easier. Not just in the profile, but everywhere else. It’s like a standard profile on steroids (sorry Bud Selig), then adding the functionality of campus section, a local section, and an exchange section. Add on top of that the ability to drag and drop and chat real-time all within your browser, and you start to see the potential.

 

2.    There IS going to be some education, but with a super quick learning curve. We’re all familiar with basic pc behavior, just not within a browser window. Once that settles in, and the students realize they can treat it like a desktop in essence, a whole new world of functionality and REAL networking opens up.

Anyway, I’m a touchy feely guy, very into the response and reaction of the students and their emotional connection with the site and what it as to offer. I just wanted to share a brief moment with yet another student who’s been “touched by a bean”. Wasn’t that a tv show or something?

I was interested to stumble upon this post over at Consumerist.com (http://consumerist.com/337097/how-do-you-get-the-most-out-of-online-reviews), where there is a discussion about the value of reviews from strangers on sites like Epinion and Yelp. It seems to be a common theme that most people appreciate what other people have to say as a whole, but are very skeptical about whom to trust.  As helpful as it can often be to hear the majority opinion, ultimately more valuable are the opinions of people like you.

This is a discussion we’ve had at the Bean.  Recommendations and word-of-mouth are a big part of our offline lives. As our offline and online lives continue to merge and our interactions on the web become less anonymous, we come to expect that the information will become more customized and relevant to us.

On Netflix you can see the average rating of a movie across all customers, but also will show you the average rating of the movie across users who have rated other movies similarly to you.  These averages can often be wildly different.  When I’m pondering what movie to get next, I really care more about the opinions of other fans of Being John Malkovich than the fans of The Princess Diaries 2: The Royal Engagement.  It’s not a perfect system but it’s definitely a cool step in the right direction.

Some of these sites have some sort of social networking aspect slapped in after the fact, but it’s hard to see how relevant these could really be in most situations, and most are still pretty thickly veiled in anonymity. I can’t imagine many people are building valuable and useful relationships through this, or taking the time to figure out where and how to find their offline friends.

I love the idea of applying the concept of these review sites to an existing social network structure, where, like, your real friends already are. As far as I can figure, the most important to us are the opinions of (roughly in order of descending importance):

1.    Our friends
2.    Friends of our friends
3.    People with whom we have something in common, like those who have the same hobby or are in a club with us
4.    People who are in our larger niche, like other students at our school
5.    People who are in the same life stage… in this case, all other students

The next step would be the whole Internet. Internet users used to be a niche – comprising mostly dungeonmasters and 30-year-olds living with their parents – but over the last ten years everyone’s gotten online. And as glad as I am that moms and grandpas and teeny-boppers and everyone in between is online, I typically don’t care what movies they like.

It’s not worth being big if you can’t be relevant, guys.