In the minds of college students, the divide has always been clear between information-hosting websites: Blackboard is synonymous with schoolwork, just as Facebook is with social networking.
Most Facebook users know, and they can no longer just be referred to as "students," that it is extremely easy to sit down at the computer and innocently log on to check your friends' updates, and stand up to stretch two hours later without quite understanding where all the time went.
While Facebook is an excellent way to kill time, as college students, we don't necessarily have that much free time to kill, and social networking sites are much less than helpful in that department.
This conflict of interest between needing the Internet to connect with classmates and complete schoolwork, and having it act as a powerful procrastination tool is a major concern with students today, and led one Virginia Tech grad to come up with a solution.
Fahad Hassan, a 2007 graduate, noticed an opportunity in the online world for a company that would combine students' interests in social networking sites with the need for better organization and interaction with regards to their busy school schedules, and thus his new website Daylert.com was born.
Hassan began conceiving his website during his study at Tech, and worked on the idea for about a year while taking classes, until he came across a very unique opportunity. An investor became interested in Hassan's idea, but wouldn't give him start-up capital until he graduated.
Such faith did he have in his ideas, that Hassan took an unprecedented 27 credits in his last semester at Tech to graduate in three years.
"As far as I know, I'm the only student who has ever taken that many credits at once, or even close," Hassan said, "but I had an investor who wouldn't give me money until I graduated. I still graduated with a 3.9 [GPA]."
The next steps, according to Hassan were, "graduate Saturday, moved back to Maryland Sunday and started the company Monday."
Since then, the site seems to have exploded overnight, though Hassan is quick to stress that it is still extremely new, and students should expect the usual technical glitches that come with a developing product.
"We're asking users to be patient and asking for lots of input and feedback," Hassan said. "We take what the community is telling us and build those features as soon as possible. Things aren't going to be perfect, we have lots of cool ideas we want to implement but it takes some time. What we want to stress right now is that we are looking for as much feedback as possible [from users]."
Hassan describes Daylert best as, "like a Blackboard meets Facebook kind of deal. We were trying to establish a social learning community or online classroom collaboration for students. They can manage courses, calendars and all with friends. That is the social networking part of it. I wanted to create a network for kids who are doing something productive. They want to have fun but there's no reason they can't do something productive at the same time."
Students can register for Daylert with their school email addresses, just like other sites, although it is now and will remain only open to students. As the site develops, it is only open to students from Tech, Radford and Fordham University in New York. Less than two weeks after the website's launch, there were around 500 users of the system, and that number is quickly climbing as news of the website's helpful features spreads.
The main feature of Daylert around which most of the other applications revolve is the calendar. For each profile students get a calendar, which they can view by day, week or month, and into which they can program everything from their class schedules to group meetings and daily reminders.
The unique aspect of Daylert is that users can add each other as friends, just like Facebook or MySpace, and also see a small personal profile, but the main focus is that students can also view each other's calendars, course schedules and all other uploaded information.
"It is basically a student-run Blackboard," Hassan describes, where students can coordinate their individual schedules and class information to say, make plans for a group assignment or organize an extracurricular activity.
The system offers even more features to help individual students stay on top of assignments and meetings, such as daily alerts, which are reminders of upcoming events in the user's schedule. Another feature allows professors or students in the same class to post their classes' syllabi, and students of that class can upload the syllabus directly onto their calendar.
For now, there is no denying that as the roughness of the program is smoothed out, it will be a monumental development in how students and staff stay organized and communicate with one another.
"It is open and free for everyone at Tech right now, so log on and mess with it, break it, that's really what we're looking for," Hassan said. "Just sign up and try it."