Student Portal Goes Live

Facebook.com procrastinators may now have a new outlet for their online addiction.

A Web portal for Harvard students, CrimsonConnect.com, opened for business late last night.

Tom D. Hadfield ’08, the Web entrepreneur who masterminded the venture with an IT multinational, co-founded the site as a student-driven alternative to University sites, such as my.harvard.edu.

The set-up allows students to piece together internet features, such as the dining hall menu, athletic scores, news feeds, and a blog aggregator.

“You create a virtual campus,” said Benjamin P. Schwartz ’10, one of the site’s co-founders. “We don’t just want a student Web portal, we want a student Web hub.”

The upstart company providing the technology, Netvibes, announced yesterday the creation of more than 100 “universes,” widget-packed portals tailored for users such as washingtonpost.com addicts, Mandy Moore fanatics, or, in this case, Harvard students.

This is not Hadfield’s first foray into cyberbusiness. Before coming to Harvard, Hadfield raked in roughly $40 million by selling SoccerNet.com, a site he created while in his teens.

Last fall, Hadfield helped launch a Undergraduate Council-sponsored Web site called CrimsonReading.org, which provides price comparisons on textbooks.

For this latest project, Hadfield said he raised small amounts of funding from private sources, though he declined to elaborate.

“That’s as much as I’m willing to say, but very little was needed,” Hadfield said. “It’s being built on a shoestring.”

Hadfield said the University sites, such as the my.harvard portal, do not provide enough services for students.

“The University’s official Web sites don’t do a very good job, so students are filling the gap,” Hadfield wrote in an e-mail. “I think students are best placed to know what students need.”

He said the site’s students backers did not consult Harvard Computing Services, which administers my.harvard, because they thought a student-run site would be able to offer services beyond the reach of a more official portal.

“For example, there’s a blog aggregator on this new portal­­­,” he said. “That’s something that the University would never allow to appear on an official portal.”

Last night, CrimsonConnect went live a little after 11 p.m., five hours later than its scheduled launch due to “infrastructure updates,” Schwartz said.

Grant W. Dasher ’09, president of the Harvard Computing Society, a student group that previously contemplated building a similar portal, expressed doubts about CrimsonConnect’s prospects for success because other “campus calendar sites” had failed to catch on.

Now that it’s online, Hadfield and Schwartz hope the site will go viral.

“With a site like this, a lot of this spreads with people­,” Schwartz said. “It’s a lot of word of mouth.”

—Staff writer Clifford M. Marks can be reached at cmarks@fas.harvard.edu.