Proving that phrase “The past repeats itself,” social media giant Facebook is launching ‘Campus, a new social media ‘space’ meant ‘exclusively’ for college students. The Tech Portal was among one of the first to report the feature almost 5 months back, when popular reverse engineer Jane Manchun Wong leaked the same to social media.
Facebook is working on “Campus”, a new space exclusive for college students
There will be Groups, Events, etc for “Campus” spaces pic.twitter.com/cfEwubLxTt
— Jane Manchun Wong (@wongmjane) April 9, 2020
Now, the feature is finally making its way to the general public. Facebook Campus will be launched as a part of the main Facebook app, instead of a separate platform.
For Facebook, and Mark Zuckerberg in particular, this is rewinding the clock by 12-14 years.
After starting off as an intra-college space for Harvard students to interact and socialize, Facebook gradually grew too big for its shoes and became an entity that now possesses over 2.7 billion monthly users worldwide. However, over this journey, the company lost touch with its original demographic, the teens, who have gravitated to other platforms like Snapchat, Instagram and TikTok.
Thus Facebook is once again heading back to its roots with the announcement of its newest addition, Facebook Campus, to tap into the market that started it all.
This will be a private space and will allow students from a particular institution to connect and socialize with their peers. Users will be able to discover campus events and form chatrooms from various in-campus social circles. To maintain discretion, students will require to have an institution mail ID(ending in .edu) to access the feature.
The company has announced that this feature will be added to the “More” tab of its main site, alongside other features like Watch, News, Marketplace etc.
With the global pandemic bringing on-campus interaction and access, to an absolute standstill, Facebook hopes to connect and bring students together, and deliver not just the educational, but the social effect of being part of an institution through an online medium.
On launch, Facebook Campus will only be available to 30 universities around the United States, with large scale expansions in the cards. In fact, a number of universities have already partnered with Facebook to bring this Campus feature to its student base.
Facebook Campus, on top of requiring a .edu mail id, will also require a graduation year to access, the user must not have graduated from the school more than 5 years prior to the current date.
On top of providing a secure private space for communication and socializing, Facebook has also announced that it won’t be adding advertisements to its Campus feature, and will provide tailor-made content to its users.
Eligible users will be sent out notifications to try out the feature, which Facebook will judge by checking your search history and if you interact with a partnered university on a regular basis. However, Facebook is also looking to advertise this feature both on online and offline mediums.
