[maxucho]

(Full disclosure: I'm the developer for this site).

You make a really interesting point, and I think the reason for this is that each college's solution is different in tiny ways. In my opinion this is not an insurmountable problem, as seen with Facebook's success. Clearly not every single person has the same exact needs with a social network, but the key is 1. Facebook is typically "good enough" for most people and 2. Everyone uses Facebook, so people look over tiny inconsistencies with their own usage to be on the same network as their friends.

However the difference, as I see it, between Facebook and something like a Craigslist for campus, a campus chat board, or campus event system is that there is only pressure to use it within distinct communities. For instance, if our site grows to dominate this space at Penn, then only students at Penn feel the pressure to use the site. A student at college X will have different classes, different events, and different needs, so even if all his/her friends at Penn use it, they would get no utility out of hopping onto the College X version of our site, if no one at College X used it.

What we have there is a situation where instead of Facebook's virus-like growth, you have distinct bubbles that need extensive, personal attention to break into. You can't just launch to a new college and immediately have users rolling in, you need a personal "in" for each college, someone (ideally multiple someones) to get real students to use it. This, naturally, requires much more effort and a lot of connections, and it's to this that I'd attribute your observation that no one product has grown to dominate this space.

For now, we're considering our site a simple experiment for Penn, and if we do end up expanding, it would only be if we could justify-—with profit from the site—-the effort needed to expand to other colleges.