Last Saturday, I got the opportunity to talk with one of the two founders of eduHookups.com, (originally titled UchicagoHookups.com) a website that has received attention from media sources all over the country, including the Huffington Post and the Tonight Show, as well as outside the U.S.
For those of you not aware of eduHookups, it is a website/chat room catered to students interested in various, often sexual activities. Students can post different listings and there is “Chat” option, in addition to “Shoutouts.” What differentiates eduHookups from Craigslist or other dating sites is that one must possess an “.edu” e-mail address to register and participate in the chat room or respond to listings, ensuring its users that their potential hook-up mates are (or once were) a part of their school.
The website was initially created as a coding project for the two founders, a learning project through which they could hone their skills and possibly catch the attention of a couple students. But why a site based on hook-ups?
In an attempt to attract a large number of viewers, the founders concocted the idea of a hook-up site in the early morning hours, recognizing that it would garner interest in a young, (may I say horny?) college audience. And it definitely worked. Soon after the launch of UChicagoHookups.com, the founders were receiving around 30 to 40 e-mails per day from students of different colleges/universities, asking them to expand the site boundaries beyond the UChicago campus.
As of now, eduHookups serves 11 schools, 7 of these in the Chicago area while the other four are scattered along the east coast. An even more impressive fact is that the website was created mid-February; it has not been up for two months, yet eduHookups has attracted approximately 1,300 students from varying campuses.
In addition to the “Listings” and “Chat” options, the website features a tab labeled “Safety”, dedicated to discussing the necessity of safe sex and condoms. The founder, who I will continue to refer to by that title to maintain anonymity, plans to further develop this section by placing advertisements of supplies promoting safe sex as well as including a paragraph that informs users of their rights. Nevertheless, a user may question the safety of meeting and possibly engaging in sexual relations with someone who (s)he met via the internet. Fears of rape or the Craigslist killer linger in some minds; furthermore, as the only requirement for registration is the possession of an “.edu” e-mail address, it is possible that older (perhaps much older) alumni are posting in hopes of attracting young students. The founder assured me, however, that he has not received a single horror story from his users. Even more, he does not believe that older alumni are seeking the casual relations promoted by the site due to their increased maturity.
Another noticeable quality of eduHookUps is that the majority of its posters are male. While the founder could not provide the exact statistics of the site’s demographics, he stated that there was not a great imbalance in gender with registered users. Since the founder and his partner are following a more laissez-faire approach with eduHookups, there are not any specific plans to pull in more female users and posters.
When asked about the recent media attention and surge in popularity, the founder asserted that neither he nor his partner had any expectation of eduHookups becoming as big as it is. The pair had initially planned on keeping the site open for a year while garnering as much traffic as possible. Yet eduHookups has now been likened to Facebook, a comparison the founder finds flattering but untrue for the two sites provide different services. The media attention, however, has brought along with it accusations that eduHookups promotes casual sex, that it encourages students to partake in relationships driven purely on the physical, an idea that perturbs those who believe succumbing to carnal desire is immoral and decreases one’s self-worth.
The founder wished to clarify the site’s purpose, describing eduHookups as providing a place for students to meet, not just have sex. The site does include the categories of “Serious” and “Platonic” in their Listings; it is the “Casual” section, though, accompanied by its icon of a crescent moon,that boasts the majority of the site’s posts.
With the expansion to other universities, the founders expect the site to continue running past its one-year expiration date if time and resources allow. Despite the fact that the two founders are basically the only ones managing the entire network, they hope to add more schools in the future. As a last note, the founder wished to state that people should not believe the negative stories constructed by the media and instead, see that the site can act in increasing the social quality of schools. It should also be noted that one word was repeatedly emphasized throughout the interview: users. The users are the ones who drive the direction of the site; it is the founders’ job to serve the users, not act on their own wants.
Will EduHookups.com eventually become a household name? Will we be watching another Fincher-directed movie based on its founding? Based on our extremely fast-paced web culture, I supposed we will find out fairly soon, but as for now, be safe collegiates and happy web-browsing to you.