In case you haven’t heard, BuddyPress is the latest addition to a series of grassroots social networking software. BuddyPress is no more than a few months old, and just recently out of beta. The concept of a Stony Brook social network has been around almost as long as BuddyPress. I spent months looking for the perfect solution to host a robust campus event system, much like the events application on Facebook. After looking seriously at Drupal, Joomla and WordPress, I found that there is no particular piece of software made for this purpose, but most content management systems have event plugins available. The other social networking solutions, such as Ning, do have event components, but the software itself is unbearable.

   I found BuddyPress completely by accident after already choosing to work with Joomla. I was looking around for better event plugins for Joomla, and I stumbled across a BuddyPress site that was using a primative WordPress events plugin. On that day I decided to switch to BuddyPress, and soon after someone began developing the events component I was looking for.

   BuddyPress 1.0 was released just a few weeks ago and it’s already getting a lot of attention. It is stable and awesome enough for VW to base its cool new TankWars website on BuddyPress. TankWars disables most of the features of BuddyPress, but they have made very similar design modifications to the ones I have made on sbulife. They only allow sign-ups through Facebook Connect, and they have removed most of the redundant navigation. This means that not only is BuddyPress officially awesome, but that sbulife is also awesome, because we have made BuddyPress even more user-friendly. And the highly paid developers at VW can back me up on that. So, where is my check?

A few years ago at a retreat, students and faculty came up with this idea of a free period of time each week that clubs would use to host major events, and the campus could connect at a personal level. They were addressing the issue of campus community, an issue that has faced this campus for as long as we have been here. Many colleges have similar issues, so they throw money at it, and people are content. We don’t have such luxuries, so we need to be a little bit more creative. I love the idea of “Campus Lifetime,” but they have forgotten one important detail; you actually need to tell people about the events you are hosting.

A student rally during Campus Lifetime

It is 12:30pm on a Wednesday today, just a few minutes before campus lifetime, and I am sitting in the basement of the union writing this article. I would be leaving for my physics lab that is scheduled during campus lifetime, but we have the week off, so I am looking for something to do with my day off. I started looking in my own calendar, nothing until Rev. Billy tonight. Then I went to Facebook, same results. I looked at all the Facebook events for today, and I only found some kind of career fair for liberal arts people. Finally the University has a little secret “Student Life” calendar. I won’t link to it, see if you can find it yourself. I use this as a last resort. It is usually full of junk from the fitness center, as it is today. I found out that there will be a table for Alternative Spring Break, and an SAB event. That’s funny, I had no idea there was an SAB event. I didn’t even find that on Facebook. Well it doesn’t look interesting anyway, but at least I know about it now.
I checked SAB’s Facebook group for it, and it turns out that it was rescheduled for April 15, although the official Student Life calendar hasn’t been updated to reflect that. Turns out there is a Baseball game against Hofstra after campus lifetime, so I might go to that.

So here I am, and it is almost campus lifetime, with no plans. I have been talking to some friends as I write this, and they also don’t know about any events going on today. Almost everyone is out of class with nothing to do. I am sure there are plenty of club meetings, but I can’t even find a current list of clubs no less their meeting times and locations. We have a serious problem here folks.

What we need is a central location for students and clubs to post events. Stony Brook needs a social network, and I think I just may have the solution. I started developing http://sbulife.com a few weeks ago with this grand vision. Clubs will create profiles and post events in one central location that students can check at any time. It works almost exactly like Facebook, and you can even use your Facebook account to connect with it instead of creating a new account. It’s not out of beta yet, but sign up now if you like the idea. We are still working on design and branding, so I am very open to ideas. Feel free to comment below.