Last year, Cornell alum Dana Lampert found himself drowning in all of the group projects and club meetings he was involved with.

He was responding to several mass e-mails on several different Web sites, and sending multiple text messages to all 10 of his group members, all just to work out a meeting time.

A task as simple as organizing meetings became overly difficult and tedious, so Lampert and three others decided to change it.

‘Everyone was using different tools to keep in touch, and I wanted a type of collaboration,’ Lampert said. ‘Different groups were using different things, and they weren’t really simple.’

In order to make his life and the lives of other students easier, Lampert, along with another senior and two programmers, developed Wiggio.com, an organizational online toolkit, whose purpose is to serve as a meeting space for groups.

On the site, users can create profiles for their groups and send out text messages, share calendars, leave voice notes, store files in a common folder and poll the group – all for free. The name ‘Wiggio’ stands for ‘working in groups.’

Features on Wiggio were made to be simple and easy to use, catering to the college audience.

Lampert said Wiggio consolidates the best features from other sites that groups often use. For example, Lampert said the creators took a look at the best polling features and recreated a similar poll on the Web site.

‘When we started, it was intended to be for class project groups for clubs on campus, but we’ve found that people are finding a lot of different applications for it,’ Lampert said.

‘RAs are using it to mange their floor and can send everyone mass text messages, survey residents for events, using it for chat rooms. A lot of sport teams have picked it up, a capella groups, charities. It’s kind of beyond what we expected.’

The plan to create the Web Site was first planned in January 2008 and it was launched in February, but not without any glitches.

Lampert said after the site gained a lot of press in the weeks before the actual launch, the site received far more traffic than expected. As a result, a lot of prospective users got turned away.

‘It was embarrassing that there was a flaw during our launch,’ Lampert said. ‘We definitely learned from that mistake.’

Lampert said his goals for the site would be having a feature through which students can sync their calendars from other sites such as Google, adding a to-do list so that different members of the group can get assignments for the project, and spreading video conferencing.

While Lampert said that so far more than 200 college campuses use the site, and currently, Lampert and the other creators are in the process of trying to spread the word to other campuses, it’s still a fairly new concept to students at Syracuse University.

Sophomore exercise science major Katlyn Haycock said she had seen the word somewhere but didn’t know what it was. She also doesn’t think Wiggio.com would be useful.

‘Probably not, because of Facebook,’ Haycock said. ‘You could create Facebook groups and write on walls instead.’

Freshman international relations major Tandameshia Hastings, on the other hand, is a member of the debate team and thinks Wiggio would really help out her group.

‘On the debate team we have a lot of issues with e-mails, and we created a site but no one really does anything on it and e-mails never get responded to, nobody ever knows what time to meet,’ Hastings said. ‘Something like this could make things really easy.’

kaoutram@syr.edu

Published on October 27, 2008 at 12:00 pm