Facebook, the ideal place to study? Well, if this question was to be answered by Hoot.Me the answer would be a big YES.
Hoot.Me is an application for Facebook that allows students to switch on study-mode. The idea itself is pretty simple and straight-forward: when you’re stuck with Math or other sciences or need to prepare for a test, use your Facebook friends to get help as often problem solving is easier in a group than studying for yourself only.
Hoot.Me enables students to put status updates of what they are currently working on and get help from friends this way. The app goes further however and let students chat and also video chat with multiple friends at the same time. Nice feature: the smart chat automatically transforms equations. A screen-sharing is planned to be integrated in the near future.
For me, there are two convincing points about Hoot.Me
a) they use Facebook the way it was originally built for, to be a social network for students and
b) they place their product there where their target audience spends lots of time already.
As adding friends on Facebook has over time shown to be somewhat of a benchmark for a younger audience anyway why not use it in a meaningful way of adding friends that can help you get better results in school. If it had existed at my time in school I would have been pretty happy to have sometimes had the possibility to get an extra dose of genius in Math (wink).
Hoot.Me took part in the DreamIt 2011 NYC summer class and the application currently has just under 200 fans on Facebook. I’m definitely going to follow this idea with some interest and want to see the next features to be rolled-out.
Website: hoot.me
Twitter: @thehootme
Facebook: HootMe
