• by Erik Sass , Staff Writer @eriksass1, February 11, 2011

While no one can question Facebook's massive success, its rapid expansion in the general population has also taken it pretty far from its roots as a social site for college students -- but now a new service, Inigral, is helping reconnect it with college life.

Inigral uses a Schools App on Facebook to enable college and university administrators to create official, exclusive sub-networks within Facebook for their students and alumni -- a sort of Facebook within Facebook. These school networks can invite incoming freshman to join via email as soon as they're accepted, helping foster a sense of community, and jumpstart the sometimes daunting process of making new friends in a new social setting. 

(The site may also have a certain utility for facilitating romantic liaisons on campus -- the ubiquitous "hookups" -- but this feature is not highlighted in its promotional materials, doubtless out of consideration to parental sensibilities).

Inigral, which recently received a $2 million investment from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to bring its service to schools with Pell Grant scholars, is actually just one of a number of new social networks which are (re-)focusing on the college crowd.

As reported in previous columns, this list includes CollegeOnly, which requires that you have a school email address to sign up; once you log in, you find yourself automatically connected to everyone else at your school who has also signed up. CollegeOnly differentiates itself from Facebook in its mission statement: "Our site is the only one that is free from parents, potential employers, and other folks that shouldn't see what you are up to on a Saturday night or at any given point during the day."

Then there's Scoop, developed by college students Nick Simmons and Michael Akilian, with support from investors including Google CEO Eric Schmidt. The service is designed to allow college students to list and promote campus events large and small, and also suggests campus activities to users with a recommendation engine drawing on data including member ratings and affinities.

And last but not least there's Diaspora, a "more secure, personalized" network which -- like CollegeOnly -- aims to give users more control in what information they share about themselves, and with whom. On its Web site, Diaspora is billed as a "privacy aware, personally controlled, do-it-all distributed open source social network." Diaspora makes a point of leaving its code open for programmers to introduce their own features, innovations, and variants.

Facebook itself has responded to this new competition with a "Universities on Facebook," promotional page, offering back-to-school discounts and pointers on how students and campus organizations can use Facebook's features to publicize events, distribute content and build community.