Playboy U offers students a new social network site

Social networking sites are a part of the modern college experience. Most people don't think past the two biggies- Facebook and MySpace. Between the two of them, you can keep track of everyone you've ever wanted to keep track of without even violating your restraining order.

But there are more. Just as Yahoo! and Google aren't the only search engines out there, Facebook and MySpace are just the biggest in the rapidly expanding arena of social networking sites.

There are sites for old and young, rich and poor, sports fanatics and purveyors of the soft-core pornographic college party life.

That's right; Playboy launched their very own social networking site, Playboy U, back in August, 2007. There are a few things the site doesn't allow: members who aren't actively in college and nude photos.

This means no high-school kids on the site, and no grown ups, not even recent alums. It also means no naked ladies or gentlemen; it is a networking site first, not some co-ed user-generated edition of the magazine.

What the site does allow is just about everything else. The target seems to be those who were alienated when Facebook opened its doors to their mom and their kid sister. Playboy U is unabashedly young and hot and drunk. The photos are about being young and hot; the forums are about being hot and drunk; the blogs are about being drunk and young.

There are people who will claim it is a clone of Facebook or MySpace. That's a little like saying that Toyota shouldn't make cars because Ford makes cars already. If you can do something a little different and a little better, why not?

I would like to point out UC has a demographic just begging for a no-grown-ups-allowed site: co-op students. Ever since it got around that employers occasionally look up potential employees on social networking sites, hundreds of our hardworking co-op students were forced to clean up their profiles and make them real world approved.

Playboy U would provide even the most acrobatic of co-op students a place to show off their keg stand skills free of career concerns. You cannot access any part of the site beyond the homepage without your own college email address and Playboy U account.

I suppose it would be possible for a particularly sneaky company to get around that; I'm sure it isn't hacker-proof. But the Internet is a big place and for now, Playboy U is small enough that most would never think to look.

I should mention at some point that I really have no idea if the people who party and do keg stands and such would actually enjoy the site, because I don't see myself as a partier in the traditional sense.

Oh, sure, I indulge, but the fun stuff tends to happen when I'm sober or over-caffeinated.

But I did speak to Jake Somerson, third year materials enginnering student and connoisseur of the college of experience. He had this to say: "Sure, it will be fun, but seeing as the age of consent for viewing or participating in pornography is 18, don't you think they're just trying to get them young?

Besides, all that sex talk will lead to hook ups, and how could you turn your back on the brand that got you laid?"