They say it's all about who you know. But for Orkut Buyukkokten and Tyler Ziemann, it’s actually about who you don’t know. As a doctoral student in computer science, Buyukkokten noticed that his fellow graduate students had a hard time meeting people with similar interests. In November 2001, he came up with the idea of an online social networking forum.
Buyukkokten, PhD ’02, recruited Ziemann, ’02, a political science major, to manage the creative and business aspects of the project. Together they created Club Nexus, a free service exclusively for Stanford students.
Club Nexus users introduce themselves by filling out profiles that can contain anything and everything from which dorm they live in to their sexual habits. They then link themselves to students they already know, and voilà! A user wants to find out who her friends’ friends are? She can view a graphical representation of the connections between Club Nexus’s members, with herself at the center. She’s dying to find out who knows someone who knows someone who knows the cute guy in Spanish class? The “shortest path” feature—a.k.a. the six degrees of separation concept—will tell her. She’s looking for a running partner who lives in Wilbur? She can apply a couple of filters and find candidates.
“The core idea of it is really useful,” says Ryan Barrett, ’02, a coterminal master’s student in computer science. “It gives you a good context to know who someone is when you know who their group of friends is.”
Club Nexus also has bells and whistles. Forums provide opportunities to discuss politics or class reading, though the two most popular focus on remedying the supposed lack of sexual activity at Stanford. In the Karma Network, students rank each other based on niceness, trustworthiness, coolness and sexiness. The algorithm worked (as measured by the third-place finish of the masterminds’ test subject, a popular student named Caroline), but received criticism from students expecting higher marks for themselves.
“Some people were upset because they’re not sexy,” says Buyokkokten.
The network initiated to connect graduate students has become widely used—by undergrads, who account for 80 percent of the 2,383 participants. “It is successful because we could do this in a closed, trusted community,” Ziemann says. “Anywhere else, you wouldn’t post this information.”
Through their new company, Affinity Engines, Ziemann and Buyokkokten hope to market the concept to other communities. Their first client: the Stanford Alumni Association, which rolled out a network called inCircle in January. Discussions are expected to be less risqué than in the student version, and to include professional networking. But the product is no less popular: 3 1/2 weeks after launch, 10,652 alumni had logged in.
So how did a computer science doctoral student and a political science undergrad meet in the first place? Through a friend of a friend, of course.
