Sitting at the restaurant Stephanie's on Newbury Street, senior Alex Maloney may be far from the Medford campus, but with the help of the new student-initiated enterprise Socialmonkey.com, a single text message from his cell phone is able to reach his entire social network at Tufts.
"See, if I text 'At Stephanie's' to Social Monkey, it will within seconds know that I'm at Stephanie's on Newbury and so if any of my friends are looking for me, they can just ask Social Monkey where I am," explains Maloney, one of four seniors involved with the new Web site.
Recently founded by three Tufts seniors, Social Monkey is the first mobile social network at any university. The site was developed in an effort to bring students together and to revitalize the often-lamented social scene at Tufts. Similar to the popular Facebook.com, Social Monkey operates with members who sign up and fill out a brief profile. Members can post pictures, write messages on each other's "blogs" and check away messages.
The essence of Social Monkey, however, is beyond that of collecting and enumerating friends in the cyber world.
"Basically, Social Monkey lets you find where your friends are and what is going on around your community," explains founding member Matt Arnold. "Users tell us where they are by 'checking-in' via text message with their cell phone or even with their computer before they go out. This allows their friends to find them or the hottest locations on campus."
"We have every restaurant and bar within 30 miles of Boston in our system," said Aaron Karp, another founding member. "So we will automatically know where you are when you check in, and it gives preference to places closer to Tufts."
With a membership topping 250, the original creators, Karp, Arnold and Mike Fuerstman have been hard at work promoting the website, hiring Maloney to spread the word about the site and help to popularize it.
According to the founders, the idea behind the site was to promote a better social scene and to facilitate the ability of Tufts students to "party" together by directing everybody to go to the same places.
"How it started, and how it will last, is because it was based on just that - on promoting a better social scene. It's all about knowing where the best parties and bars are and bringing Tufts students together," Karp said.
While the format of the site will be familiar to most college students, due to its similarity to Facebook, there are certain features that might be more foreign.
"The setup is familiar to people because it is like Facebook but because it's from your phone you can do it absolutely anywhere," Maloney said.
"People can sign up through the Web site and give us as much or as little info as they want," Karp added. "It's very quick. You set up a profile, which everyone's already used to doing from other websites."
"That's kind of like your home base on the Web site where you can see all your friends' profiles, browse places around your school and add them to your locations," he continued. "You can give people and place nicknames so that it's easier when you're texting. For example you can enter Stephanie's and save it as 'Steph's'."
The three seniors - and roommates - came up with the idea for the site one evening as they sat in front of the television trying to find out where to go that night.
"We were sitting around on a Thursday night, and 10:30 p.m. comes around and we were wondering what was going on on-campus and someone said, 'Hey I wish there was a way to figure out what was going on," Karp said.
"The idea came about from asking ourselves the very same recurring question we are trying to answer for Social Monkey users - 'What's going on right now?'" Arnold said.
"Sitting around our apartment one night, Mike was the first to pose the question, saying that he really wanted to go out, but had no idea what was going on," Arnold continued. "We were saying that we wished there was an easy way to find out what is going on around campus."
"We tossed around ideas for a bit and finally hit upon text messaging as a way to accomplish this. Over the next few days we sketched out the basic system and we were running," Arnold said.
This "system" includes a glossary of 15 commands which are explained on the website. For example, by texting the command "at" followed by a place, name, or address to txt@smgo.com, you are able to tell your Social Monkey friends your physical location. Similarly, you can text "find" followed by a friend's name to find the location of a Social Monkey friend.
But perhaps the most useful command for students to be able to find the most popular nightlife spots is the "update" command.
"If you text 'update' followed by a place, you can find out how many of your friends and total Social Monkey members are at that place. A message will be returned to you telling you about who's at a given place," Karp explained. "For example my friend Mike could text 'update,' and it will tell him that he has three friends at [Broadway bar] El Guapo, two friends at Powderhouse Pub, and that there are 60 total Social Monkey users at El Guapo."
"I've found it really easy to use, and it's really helpful in finding where your friends are and where they're going," said sophomore Josh Rogol, who recently signed up for the site. "As more people sign up, it's becoming more useful."
"Basically, the site comprises a variety of things that you would be doing anyway. Telling people where you are, seeing if they want to come out, stuff like that," Maloney said.
"Often it's really crowded and noisy at a bar, and you don't want to be talking on the phone. So you can just type the 'at' command to Social Monkey, and you don't have to respond to ten different friends telling them where you are, and whether it's good," he added.
"They can see that you're there, and they can see if it's good by texting the 'info' command and seeing how many people are there. So again, it's all stuff you'd be doing anyway but it makes it less cumbersome."
According to Rogol, he has been finding the site increasingly useful. "I've been checking in from my phone when I'm at campus parties, fraternities, or bars like El Guapo. As people see that it's being more widely used, they'll start to use it too," he said.
While the idea of making socializing and party-finding "less cumbersome" might seem attractive to many students, to others, the idea of people being able to "find" you at any moment seems to cross a line in terms of privacy.
Karp shook his head. "We take privacy very seriously. Our policy is very long and detailed," he explained. "There is absolutely no way anyone can use our service to find out anything about you unless you want them to."
"No one is going to find out where you are or what your favorite color is unless you give them permission," he said.
"First of all, you have to 'check in' for people to know where you are, and unless you do that Social Monkey won't be able to tell people your location."
"Secondly," he said, "we have commands like 'block' which allow you to disable certain people from being able to see you no matter where you are. And the commands 'on' and 'off' determine whether anybody can find you," he added. "Privacy was a major concern when we went into it."
While the site only currently exists for Tufts students, the Social Monkey team is planning to expand.
"Right now, we are fine-tuning the site and getting ready to launch at all the Boston colleges. After that, I am not really sure where we'll go next, but our goal is to be anywhere people are socializing and attempting to find out 'what is going on tonight'," Arnold said.
"I think the merit of our service will get people to use it, we just have to get the word out, the whole idea behind Social Monkey is to facilitate people having a social life and spending their time in the best way they can," Maloney said.
"And with Tufts," he added, "there has been a problem with social life."
"With the Greek life on campus going through such fractious times and there just generally being fewer parties and things to do at night on campus, we're hoping that our service will bring some vitality back to the Tufts scene and that it will get people organized about it," Maloney said.
