Student Network Takes on Big Kids

A WELLINGTON student is taking on MySpace and Bebo with his own social networking website.

The Student Network website is open only to high-school and tertiary students in New Zealand and is the brainchild of Jeremy Fraser, who recently graduated from Onslow College in Johnsonville.

He isn’t a typical young tech entrepreneur. He built the site using pre-made PHP script that he bought online, with some extra work by himself and his friends in their spare time.

“In the early days I spent most nights on it when I probably should have been doing homework,” he says.

This year he plans to attend Victoria University and study accounting.

He’s not a big fan of Bebo or MySpace, but he saw how successful the sites are and thought the time was right for something with a Kiwi flavour.

Student Network has about 400 members.

Mr Fraser has spent about $1000 so far on building the site and plans to promote it this year with flyers, posters and e-mails. When the site has more members, he intends to put advertisements on it to recoup his costs.

Like MySpace and Bebo, there are no age checks in place to prevent non-students joining Student Network.

But he says the site is still small enough that he can keep an eye on what people say and the pictures they post, and says finding the fakers is not hard.

“It’s obvious who is a student and who isn’t.”

(c) 2007 Dominion Post. Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning. All rights Reserved.