By the end of the year, you will be on SBUlife one way or another, so may as well get started now. We can’t accept bribes or personal favors, and we can’t give you funding just because we like you or your cause, but everybody appreciates a club committed to responsible marketing. Lets create a vibrant culture where clubs compete for attention on campus and in the community. If you want to have a real impact, start here at a public university by exercising that free speech. Get out there and start marketing!

To get started, think of the url you want and go to it to check if it is available.

1. http://sample.sunysb.net

2. Fill out the form on the page to create it.

3. Login to your blog’s Dashboard and poke around. Create your first blog post with Posts>Add New

4. To build the website navigation, Create a static page with Pages>Add New

5. No need to design your website, choose from more than 100 professional themes in Appearance>Themes

Best of all, anyone can make their own free SBUlife blog. Make it for your club or for yourself, and never worry about the long address and limited hosting provided by the university again. If you need assistance, we will have a team of web developers to help you customize your website. Feel free to contact me: dmazza [@stonybrookusg.org]

In that time, we have released quite a few new features, and we have a brand new version coming very soon.
Recently Added Features:

• Facebook Connect: No need to create an account, just use your Facebook account to sign in with one click. If you stay signed into Facebook, you will stay signed into SBUlife.
• Group Events: When you create an event, you can associate the event with your group, just like Facebook. The event will link to your group and your group will show the event.
• Group Blogs: When you create a blog for your group, you can associate that blog with the group, and every member of the group is instantly a member and contributor to the blog. Your website will be more active than ever.
• Friends’ Activity: A custom feed of just your friends’ activity.
• Brand New Layout: We have developed our own unique design for SBUlife to make it easier to use and more familiar for Facebook users.

New Features coming soon:

• Status Updates
• Filtered Activity Feeds
• Refreshed Look and Feel
• Facebook Status Updates
• Create and RSVP to Facebook Events
• Twitter Wire and Updates

This network is focused around publicizing events on campus, so this is an important addition to the functionality of the site. You can see this in action if you look at the USG group page and events.

We hope to add recurring events (like meetings) and automated notifications for attendees. The majority of the software we are using to run the site is in beta or pre-beta, so obviously some of the functionality is still missing or buggy. Please send me a message if you find anything strange.

Update:
The upgrade has been completed. Just a few minor things left to work out. However, we will now be going through regular weekly upgrades, so the site could go down at any time.

For my fellow developers testing out the site, we are running Wordpress MU 2.7.1, Buddypress 1.0 RC2 r1324, and bp-events 0.55
I’d like to thank Erwin Gerrits for his Buddypress Events Component.

I believe that the largest factor contributing to our highest ranking, #3 for unhappiest students, is our complete lack of community on campus. Many large universities face this problem, and most simply throw money at it. We don’t have money to throw at anything. We have pleanty of events going on all the time, but it is very hard to find out about them. These events are mostly attended by friends of the club, and some aren’t even advertised. Without a great campus community, word-of-mouth doesn’t work very well.

The new Stony Brook now has the money and reputation to hold some great events and host some great speakers, but there is no central location to get the word out about them. The idea of a campus social network is still very young, but a few schools are trying out the idea. A startup at Yale developed their social network. It appears to be a great success. I thought of developing a social network as I faced the task of redeveloping the USG website. I starting looking into different software solutions, and other universities’ solutions. No other university has really developed a full social network like SBU Life, but there are some decent event-based community solutions out there. I hope to drive a new kind of campus community with SBU Life, and I will hope you will join me with this preview of the new Stony Brook.

We hope to release SBU Life before the Fall ‘09 semester.