CommonRoom is the college social networking service created by Aaron Greenspan to rival Facebook. There are currently only 1247 registered college students at 157 Universities, so not many people have looked inside the service yet.

My first impression after logging into CommonRoom was that it needed quite a bit improvement in its design and interface. The navigation bar on the top of each page is presented via Flash, and plays little animations when your cursor passes over each item. The choice to use Flash is annoying to Internet Explorer users, who must deal with the "Click to activate and use this control" prompt Microsoft recently implemented. There is also a Flash news ticker strip at the bottom of each page.

The features available on the navigation bar are: email, calendar, connections, share, courses, buy & sell, bills, photos, jobs, and games. They seem to offer too many features with too little purpose, but that might be due to the fact that only about 1000 people use the website so far... Once more people begin contributing to the website's content, the various sections might be more interesting.

The service also uses frames, making navigation tedious and bookmarking impossible. I assume they chose to do this to have the navigation links at the top permanently available to users, but it drastically reduces the amount of content that can be viewed in the lower frame. For users with lower monitor resolutions, this area will be even smaller. The design is cluttered, unintuitive, and not nearly as effective as Facebook's simple interface.

Customizing your profile involves adding "profile elements". This way, you add what you want instead of leaving boxes blank. However, I found the options slightly strange. There were two elements, "Son" and "Stepsons", that puzzled me. Are college students supposed to list the sons and stepsons they have? There is also an element named "Social Class". I'm not sure what that one is meant for either. People will probably have fun with that one and enter things such as "Shogun" or "Peon".

When uploading photos to your album, one of the drop down menus is for stating who the photograph of the photo is. After clicking the menu, an absurdly long list appears, of which 75% are commas. After scrolling past the hundreds or thousands of commas, you arrive at the list of names. I can't imagine why you would put an enormous drop down menu of full names on a website, but that's what they have. Definitely scalable...

I clicked a link to enter a blogs section, but was greeted with "The table is empty. Please add a record." That probably needs work. A link to the movies section generates the message "We're working on getting this feature ready for you! For now, you can e-mail submissions to [email]."

I believe that CommonRoom needs some major design work and changes in the way users navigate. In other words, they have quite a bit of catching up to do with Facebook, but 1247 registered members is definitely not a bad way to start things off. The site just feels so... 1999.