Washington Week: Student Voices (O)

Move aside, MySpace: New networking site is climbing the ranks
By Brian Hartley
Dakota Student (U. North Dakota)
12/22/2006

(U-WIRE) GRAND FORKS, N.D. — Having profiles on Myspace.com, and Facebook.com are a way of life for many college students today, but students, along with the world at large, are about to be introduced to something that may very well be the next big thing in the online social networking world.

Zemble.com was created by recent University of California-Los Angeles graduates Doug Ludlow and Johann Moonesinghe after Ludlow witnessed something that came as a shock to him.

Several months ago there were large protests in the Los Angeles area over a bill before the U.S. Senate that would have made being in the country illegally a felony.

Ludlow discovered that a great deal of the planning for that protest was facilitated by groups on Myspace.com and text messaging among the protesters.

Afterward he began to question how something like this could be done on a grander scale. From there, Zemble.com was born.

As Ludlow explained it, "We've taken the best of Facebook, and MySpace — all the cool things you can do, with the benefit of texting."

Zemble works like this: Users create their profile and add friends much like other social networking sites, but from there users can create messages and send them to their "Zemble," which is essentially a group, and everyone who has elected to receive the message gets it.

Ludlow sees this as potentially a huge benefit to many clubs and organizations, because as he explains it, "it's instant communication without a computer."

Moonesinghe also sees Zemble as a way to revolutionize advertising, as both a benefit to the advertiser and the consumer. He hopes to someday see small ads included with Zembles, but only the type that he refers to as "unobtrusive messages ... similar to banner ads."

For now, the site serves as a tool for people who like to text message friends and family on a regular basis by sending the message through Zemble.com once, as opposed to sending individual messages to people which can be expensive for people who are charged by their cellular phone service providers on a per-text basis.

Ludlow & Moonesinghe both had successful careers outside the dot-com world prior to starting Zemble.com. Ludlow worked on staff for California Lt. Gov. Cruz Bustamante, and Moonsinghe worked as a consultant for government and corporate entities in Washington.

Both are very optimistic about the future of Zemble, with Moonesinghe adding, "We've had an overwhelming positive response (to the site)."

There are also big additions coming to the site in the near future with the addition of a calendar system that will allow users to keep track of important events by placing them on the calendar, and then allowing the calendar to send users a text reminder for their event.

Zemble Web developers also are working on incorporating news alerts and sports scores into the system's capabilities, something expected to be in place within a few weeks.

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