campusLIVE.com
How convenient would it be to have a homepage that worked for you? An all-in-one type deal with built-in news feeds, favorite links, a search engine, and email? A number of different sites and toolbars claim to do so by integrating these most important internet pages and apps together into one “homebase” site, but most of these are rubbish. Even popular exceptions like the customizable Gmail homepage are limited in the type of media they can aggregate. For example, you probably won’t find live Twitter updates beside your Gmail weather report, and you certainly won’t find a link to Blackboard there. So how can you combine social media, email, school, and entertainment in a single ocation that might actually be beneficial to you as a student? Consider giving campusLIVE.com a try.
CampusLIVE describe themselves as the “‘College Homepage’, providing single-click access to college resources. From university email, athletics, news and Facebook to local restaurants and entertainment, the campus specific homepages serve college students.” And believe it or not, they deliver!
When you first log on, the site defaults by giving you pretty standard college student links, like FB and YouTube, along with a bunch of potentially useful gadgets including “Food Finder” and a Google search engine. The site also does a great job of connecting you many relevant school-specific locations. The page’s header bar contains links to myUM, Blackboard, HurricaneSports, the Richter Library page, and even laundryview.com, a free site that lets you monitor the availability of washers and dryers across UM’s campus (useful if you live in the dorms and don’t feel like wasting the time required to find out in person).
The best part of this site though is probably its inherent degree of customization. Starting when you sign up you’ll be promted to customize your own campusLIVE page. This means playing with the page’s theme (would you like a beer, sports, plain color, or half-naked dudes style background?), choosing which links you want to display on your page, and organzing the page layout. You can also decide what sources the site should access in compiling your newsfeed. I’m currently pulling info from The Miami Herald, The Miami Hurricane, and AP. Some affiliated websites even work directly with campusLIVE so that you never have to navigate beyond your homepage to get work done. I did this with my Twitter account. I can receive feeds from the people I’m following and update right from my hurricaneLIVE page! So cool!
There is some really superfluous and overtly college crap that starts on your page by default, but you can easily remove or minimize these apps if you find them annoying. This and the fact that you can’t seem to eliminate the “Raffle” box (essentially an ad outlet) are the only real downsides of this website. Everything else is helpful and convenient. It’s nice to jump online and have everything you need right in front of you.
