RoomBug

New RoomBug Search Feature Launched!

April 14th, 2010

Well, it’s now mid-April and our roommate matching networks across the country have been buzzing with activity. We have received a lot of great suggestions from our users for added features. Two features that we have launched in response to user feedback are our redesigned matching network page and a ’search by name’ feature.

Each RoomBug matching network has its own network page which gives basic information about the community, directions for finding a roommate, and launching off buttons to search and browse potential roommates. Users were having difficulty getting started with searching for roommates, so we have relocated the Browse / Search buttons to a more prominent place on your community’s page. This is now located just above the newly added discussion board, which replaces the old “Wall”. We also added a discussion board where users can start their own discussion topics. These tweaks will help guide users towards successfully finding a roommate on RoomBug.

The second feature is our new ‘Search by Name’ feature. We had several users write into us to request that we provide a way for users to search for others by name. Since these requests, we have implemented a new search feature which allows users to do just that. We also placed an algorithm into the search–if a user misspells a persons name, they will be presented with some possible search suggestions. We hope this feature will help users to become more familiar with each others lifestyle preferences and increase roommate requests overall.

Thanks to our users for the great feature requests and keep them coming!

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Posted in Facebook, Roommate Matching, Technology | 1 Comment »

On Facebook and Entrepreneurship

March 13th, 2010

I have been on Facebook since the good old days when it was just open to college students, way back in 2004. This quick video captures my thoughts on Facebook and finding a muse to motivate you to do great things!

What things in life do you have a healthy obsession with and how are you creating value with it? Would love to hear your comments!

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Tags: Entrepreneurship, Facebook, Facebook Profiles
Posted in Entrepreneurship, Facebook | No Comments »

What’s in a Roommate Questionnaire – How Our Online Questionnaire Tool Works To Assist Residents During Matching

March 8th, 2010

An important part of any roommate matching process is providing some type of survey questionnaire for residents to complete prior to roommate selection. While RoomBug provides a rich environment for residents to do their own roommate matching by communicating with others using Facebook, we understand that it is important to have a questionnaire to separate those roommates that residents wouldn’t consider living with.

We have built a robust lifestyle questionnaire tool inside of the RoomBug application. When users setup their account, they will click through to the ‘Lifestyle Preferences’ tab. First, they will complete a 5 point questionnaire defining themselves as roommates. The questions we ask are:

- neatness level

- preferred bedtime

- visitor frequency

- activity level

- academic vs. social focus

By providing a 1-5 scale, users have flexibility in defining themselves rather than just providing a simple ‘yes or no’ response. After they have completed these 5 questions for themselves, they then complete the same 5 questions for their ideal roommate. As mentioned in a recent OACUHO blog post, it is very important to ask questions that answer what the user is like and also what their ideal roommate is like. In addition, there should be the ability to weight each question by importance. RoomBug’s questionnaires accomplish this by the inherent feature of selecting a range for each ideal roommate. If the student does not value the answer to a certain question, they will select a wide range for that question. However, if the student finds the answer very important to a potential roommate, they will select a small range for their answer. The final question asked to users is if the student would prefer to live with a smoker or a non-smoker.

When lifestyle preferences are complete, users will begin looking for roommates. On our browse page, we allow users to turn their lifestyle filter on and off. By turning the filter on, all answers selected for their ideal roommate are instantly applied and the population of potential roommates is reduced to only those that have defined themselves within the user’s ideal ranges. This streamlines the matching process and facilitates good communication to help ensure that roommates enter into a living environment with a mutual understanding of living arrangements.

The lifestyle questionnaire is just one aspect of the RoomBug application and while it is a useful tool to facilitate in the matching process, research shows that better roommate matches do not directly result from providing these types of questionnaires. Instead, the ability for students to control the matching process has a much higher correlation with better matches. That’s why offering a roommate matching solution to residents through Facebook is so effective. Facebook is a social networking website so it’s easy to communicate with roommates right within the RoomBug application!

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Tags: content filtering, Facebook, Facebook Profiles, RoomBug, roommate, Roommate Matching
Posted in College, Facebook, Roommate Matching, Technology | No Comments »

How Big an Impact Does Your Freshman Roommate Have on You?

February 27th, 2010

It’s always fun to guess how much your roommate affects the type of person you become. Without a doubt, someone that you live with for an extended period of time has some type of effect on you, but how much? There was a study done by Bruce Sacerdote at Dartmouth University measuring just that. In the study, titled “Peer Effects With Random Assignment: Results for Dartmouth Roommates”, Bruce analyzes freshmen year roommates and dormmates that are randomly assigned to live on campus together.

He found that roommates will have an effect on your GPA as well as social groups that you decide to join. Interestingly, peers seem to have no real effect on major decisions such as what college major you decide on. Why is this? Well its certainly more difficult to study in your room if you have a roommate that is partying alongside you all night long.

Why are freshmen influenced by roommates and dormmates to join social groups, such as fraternities and sororities? The study says there was no direct correlation between your roommate and what social group you joined, however there was a strong correlation between your dormmates (others in your same residence hall) and which you joined.

Give the study a read, which is full of insights and lots of technical data results from the study. And comment here if you’ve come across any other interesting roommate studies!

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Tags: College Life, roommate
Posted in College, Roommate Matching | No Comments »

Emory University and RoomBug Integrate on Facebook Platform

January 29th, 2010

Emory University and RoomBug® Integrate to Provide Enhanced Roommate Browsing and Selection on Facebook Platform®

Gainesville, FL 1/20/10 – Emory University has partnered with RoomBug, an application on Facebook co-developed by Emory graduate Ariel Himmelstern(CIO), to allow incoming freshmen and returning students the option to select their own roommates online using Facebook.

Beginning this spring, over 4,000 Emory University students living on-campus will be able to find and select their own roommates easily via Emory’s password-protected RoomBug network on Facebook Platform, empowering them to search for and communicate with potential roommates online.

“What Emory wanted was a method for students both on campus and around the world to be able to search for and interact with potential roommates.” said Joni Tyson, Assistant Director of Residence Life, Emory University. “RoomBug provides a method for students to do just that in an environment they are already familiar with and utilize on a regular basis”.

RoomBug users can browse through Facebook profiles of potential roommates, finding common friends and searching for users with shared interests such as favorite books and movies. Users are able to interact with each other via Facebook in a variety of ways, including direct messaging, in order to get a better sense of a potential roommate. Michael Hacker, RoomBug CEO, expressed the core essence of RoomBug as “empowering residents to make their own roommate decision rather than leaving it up to fate.” Many university housing divisions have noted that after delivering roommate assignments selected by housing staff, their office was flooded with phone calls from students and parents asking for a new roommate selection based upon Facebook profile data. RoomBug alleviates this problem by integrating Facebook early in the matching process, before rooming decisions have been made.

After roommate matches have been confirmed on RoomBug, Emory students will be directed to the Emory housing website to make their final selection official.

About RoomBug
RoomBug offers collegiate-focused software solutions through Facebook Platform. RoomBug product offerings include RoomBug Campus, RoomBug Off-Campus and RoomBug Referral, which cater to university housing divisions, by-the-bed leasing properties and traditional leasing properties, respectively. RoomBug also offers full integration with universities through Residential Management Systems, the worldwide leader in university housing software. Clients using RMS will automatically receive roommate selections through seamless synchronization between RMS and RoomBug.

RoomBug was recently selected as one of fifty global finalists in the latest round of fbFund, Facebook’s seed fund and mentorship program with Accel Partners and Founders Fund, to help enable talented developers and entrepreneurs to build sustainable businesses on Facebook Platform.
Facebook is a registered trademark of Facebook Inc.

About Emory University
Emory University, a private research university located in Atlanta, GA, is internationally recognized for its outstanding liberal arts college, highly ranked professional schools, and comprehensive healthcare system. The University has 11,300 students and 2,500 faculty members who represent all regions of the United States and more than 100 foreign nations. Emory College, the four-year undergraduate division of Emory University, offers a broad and rigorous liberal arts curriculum with over 70 majors and 55 minors. In addition to Emory College, the University encompasses a graduate school of arts and sciences; professional schools of medicine, theology, law, nursing, public health, and business; and Oxford College, a two-year undergraduate division on the original campus of Emory in Oxford, GA.

Media Contacts:
RoomBug: Robert Castellucci, rob@roombug.net
Emory: Joni Tyson, jtyson@learnlink.emory.edu

Click here to download this press release

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Tags: Emory University, Facebook, Facebook Profiles, RoomBug, roommate
Posted in College, Roommate Matching, Technology | No Comments »

RoomBug Integrates Defensio to Protect Users from Profanity and other Malicious Content

January 27th, 2010

The web is brimming with all types of content, some good and some bad. On the RoomBug application, there is also a lot of content that users can access while searching for the perfect roommate at their university or off-campus apartment. We give users access to Facebook profiles and lifestyle preferences to help them make the roommate decision. As we were building the application, we received a lot of great feedback from our clients. What we heard is that they wanted to see an editable text area where users can write down what they are looking for in a roommate. This was a great idea and we decided to implement the “About Me” and “About My Roommate” tabs for this purpose.

These descriptions can be seen by other users as they are looking for roommates.

With great power comes great responsibility. Now that we have given users the ability to enter whatever descriptive text they would like to, how do we make sure that they enter appropriate content? With thousands of users, it becomes difficult to monitor language through manually searching each RoomBug network. Enter Defensio!

Defensio is a new security suite for the Web, and it has the ability to integrate directly into Facebook applications like RoomBug. What Defensio does is allow the RoomBug application to block users from entering inappropriate and malicious content within these two sections, helping to keep the site clean of offensive language.

New editable section, protected by Defensio for offensive language

If a user is attempting to post content with a word that Defensio deems offensive, the user will be directed to a page notifying them that they must go back and edit their content because their is profanity.

Content blocked by Defensio

Let us know what you think about our integration with Defensio, comments are always welcome!

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Tags: content filtering, defensio, RoomBug
Posted in Roommate Matching, Technology | No Comments »

Websites are SO last decade – 6 Reasons Why Facebook Pages are the Websites of the Future

January 14th, 2010

Facebook is all around us, and ever since Facebook pages have been redesigned to look more like Facebook profiles, they have been gaining a lot of attention from small organizations and big companies alike. I’ve been giving it some thought and for 80-90% of websites out there, it makes sense to make their Facebook Page the primary mode of communication and elivery of whatever value they have to offer.

I came across a great blog post titled “The Facebook Page is the New Website” and the author outlines 4 reasons to back up the claim:

1. Facebook has the numbers and loyalty

2. Searches WITHIN Facebook continue to grow

3. Facebook isn’t just for young people anymore

4. People use Facebook to organize

——-I’ll add 2 reasons – SEO & EASE OF USE.

5. SEO - Search Engine Optimization is great for fan pages. These pages get very high ranking on Google searches, which means you spend less time having to worry about optimizing your website. By the way, here’s a list of Facebook Fan Page SEO strategies to optimize your fan page for Google searches.

6. EASE OF USE – Here’s the big one in my eyes. The new web is about giving everyone a voice, not just those that work at the big PR firms. Anyone with a laptop can wield enormous power that a decade ago would have been unthinkable. Same goes for websites vs. fan pages. Very few people actually know how to develop a website, and its a big cash outlay to pay for development. And once you have the site how you want it, it will often go dead since you don’t want to pay for little upgrades here and there. I know many sites that haven’t been updated in over 3 years because of this.

What a Facebook Page allows you to do is 1)easily setup an online presence for free that 2)looks professional and 3) you can easily update whenever you want. Now I know, most of the fan pages out there may not seem top of the line professional. True, you are never going to have fan pages that look like professionaly developed websites. However for those that just need an online presence to give information and have conversations, fan pages are it. Plus, you can always do something like what BMW of Minnetonka did, this is a great example of a fan page, and they integrated some cool functionality pieces for inventory.

The key to making the fan page your own is the static fbml application, which you add to your fan page. What this does is allow you to add as many custom tabs as you’d like, where you have a blank canvas to place any html code you’d like. This gives you the flexibility that normally fan pages don’t provide.

It’s quite plausible that as Facebook becomes more and more pervasive throughout the world, many businesses will start making their fan page a substitute to any kind of external website, not a complement to the site. And if they still want a professional e-mail and web presence, then simply buy the domain, and have it forward to your Facebook Page.

Now this is certainly not appropriate for every business. Many will need to have a separate website if their functionality is delivered through their site, however if you are using the site as an advertising, sales, informational tool, I urge you to think ahead of the curve and make your fan page a key aspect of your business, and maybe the only website you’ll ever need.

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Tags: Facebook, Fan Page, Websites
Posted in Facebook, Technology | No Comments »

Best Facebook Songs

January 1st, 2010

As Facebook has become more popular, I’ve been seeing more and more Facebook-related songs. The suprising thing is that I actually like most of them. Or maybe that isn’t so suprising since hearing a song about something you really like is a good combo towards liking that song, so bravo to artists for leveraging this. Here are my top Facebook song picks:

1. Facebook Her: I heard this after reading AllFacebook.com’s article – Facebook Her: The Country Facebook Song

2. Facebook Song – This one is very catchy and funny. Maybe its so funny because its so true…

3. Website Story – Ok, not quite exclusively about Facebook, still very funny though enjoy!

Website Story

Have you found any other Facebook songs that you love? Let us know by commenting below!

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Tags: Facebook
Posted in Facebook | No Comments »

How to get along with your roommate (hint: pick the right one)

December 31st, 2009

It can be difficult to find a roommate that you get along with. There is no secret formula. Certainly best friends do not always make the best roommates, nor do complete strangers. Even though I run a roommate matching company, its ironic that I lived by myself for a year during college. What I think it comes down to is having mutual respect for one another and being open and honest about things. In case that sounds a bit too general and fluffy for you, here’s a nice list of 10 ways to annoy your roommates, so be sure and avoid all of these! And the University of Georgia also recently put out the Ten Crucial Tips for Getting Along With Your Roommate.

One great feature on RoomBug is the ability for users to fill out their lifestyle preferences on a 1-5 scale for there neatness level, preferred bedtime, visitor frequency, acitivity level, and academic vs. social focus. They fill these out for themselves and their ideal roommates, then can auto-filter potential roommates by only those that have defined themselves as a 4 or a 5 on neatness. This is a great initial way to find some good potential roommates while using RoomBug, however the next step is really to begin a conversation and talk about anything and everything with your potential roommate.

Don’t expect to get things right the first time. One of the great things about college (and beyond) is learning to better understand people. Living with roommates is a key part of this learning experience. Hopefully through roommates you will learn to build positive relationships with others, and also learn to understand more of what you really care about, not just what extrinsically attracts you (like the size of the TV your roommate is willing to put in the living room).

Happy New Year!

: On RoomBug, you can select on a 1-5 scale the living preferences for yourself and your ideal roommate.

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Tags: College Life, Facebook, Facebook Profiles, roommate
Posted in College, Facebook, Roommate Matching | No Comments »

Facebook in 3D!

December 24th, 2009

I’ll be the first to admit that I spend way too much time on Facebook. In fact, a natural reason to start a Facebook company was to have an excuse for being online all day and still look productive. Being on Facebook all day is one thing, however one of my favorite happenings is when I am sitting at Starbucks and I hear someone talking about an experience they had on Facebook. For some reason, its just a unique thing that you’re not used to people talking about. I think this is because Facebook is such a personal part of people’s lives, and when you hear a stranger talking about their Facebook, its almost as if they are talking about a personal relationship in earshot of strangers.

Over the past year, I have been hearing these kinds of conversations more and more. I’ve also been seeing more signs popping up from local businesses saying “Find us on Facebook”. I’ve also seen more Facebook t-shirts around town. Maybe its my own selective perception, but it seems like there is a lot more talk about Facebook in real life.

Then, I came across the below and lost it. In the video, a couple is getting married at the alter. The minister pronounces them husband and wife, then the couple proceeds to take out their cell phones and update their Facebook relationship status to ‘Married’! I rolled on the floor laughing, and then realized that the newlyweds did this partly as a joke, however I bet that part of the reason was because Facebook is an important part of their lives and they wanted Facebook associated with their marriage ceremony. After I finished laughing, I gave a guilty smirk as I quietly decided that I’d ask my future wife and I to do the same thing.

Facebook is growing into every facet of our lives, our REAL lives. Facebook will become the operating system of the web, just as Windows is the operating system of the computer (I’m a Mac guy, so hopefully this statement will need to be amended in 10 years). You will use your Facebook account to buy things online and serve as your identification just as your passport would be shown overseas. This is where the future of Facebook is headed, for better or worse, till death do us part.

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Tags: Facebook, Facebook Profiles
Posted in Facebook | 1 Comment »

New RoomBug Search Feature Launched!

On Facebook and Entrepreneurship

What’s in a Roommate Questionnaire – How Our Online Questionnaire Tool Works To Assist Residents During Matching

How Big an Impact Does Your Freshman Roommate Have on You?

Emory University and RoomBug Integrate on Facebook Platform

RoomBug Integrates Defensio to Protect Users from Profanity and other Malicious Content

Websites are SO last decade – 6 Reasons Why Facebook Pages are the Websites of the Future

Best Facebook Songs

How to get along with your roommate (hint: pick the right one)

Facebook in 3D!

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