City college students create their own social network

While Social Network, a movie based on Facebook, won several Golden Globe awards, in Mumbai another social networking revolution is being designed by Vidyalankar Institute of Technology students.

Vidyalankarlive is the final destination for all college activities — be it assignments, circulars or canteen gossip. Popularly called V! Live on campus, the interactive website gets more than 1.5 lakh hits every day.

All students, faculty and staff have profiles on the website. They can leave messages, play interactive games, download reference material and customise it. The website is created and moderated by three final year engineering students — Arvind Narayanan, George Abraham and Mohamed Nadeem. “We have 2,071 members on our website. Everyone in college is on it. We are now working towards designing a format for cellphones so that people get mobile updates,” said Narayanan.

The webiste began last year with the aim of creating a repository of reference material to save students arduous trips to the college library. It soon added features such as discussion forums, games and online polls on college issues.

Four months ago, the college administration made it the official portal. “These experiments enable students to put their theories to practice while learning,” said principal Seema Shah.