By Jessica Lewis, News Editor
Two University students have recently launched a social networking site that has been functional for three and a half weeks.
Jon El Kordi-Hubbard and Shashank Sanjay, both freshmen, are appealing to the Hofstra community with something they describe as, "an online multimedia café," called The Squib. (Squib.me). Squib means an original idea, comment or saying, Hubbard said.
The Squib was created using Ning, a website dedicated to allowing people to create customized social networking sites. A monthly fee is also paid to keep The Squib running.
"If you can imagine the media promotion aspect of Facebook, and the community feel of Facebook, that is what our site is," a press release issued by Hubbard said. However, Hubbard and Shashank say that The Squib is different from Facebook.
"Facebook focuses more on the individual, whereas The Squib is an interactive experience," Hubbard said. "The difference is that we want the site to primarily be about the content."
"All the customizability of Myspace meets the professionalism of Facebook," Sanjay said. "It's [The Squib] like an underground music site."
The Squib allows users to post content, such as blog posts, music, videos, communicate with other users and update statuses. The Squib originally started out as, "an inventory of cool websites we liked, like YouTube pages, Twitter Profiles and blogs, and we urged our users to go on and check out the websites," Hubbard said.
Hubbard and Sanjay started the site, and just showed it to a close group of friends. "It started off as a fun project," Sanjay said, "and we told our friends, and they said we should tell others… we have just been promoting through our friends and families, catching onto Hofstra is one of our goals, but not the only thing."
The goal for The Squib is to have 1,000 members by the summer time. They currently have 180. "We don't want it to be mainstream, we think it is different we want it to be more private," Hubbard said.
Sanjay wants the Hofstra community to use The Squib. "Give it a shot, use it, see what is on there, become a part of the community, and if you really don't like it, let us know."
The Squib is a new social networking site created by students Jon El Kordi-Hubbard and Shashank Sanjay. (Photo Courtesy Squib.me)