Watch out, Facebook, there’s a new social network in town.

Two MBA graduates at the University of Connecticut created Shizzlr, a social planning website that allows students to connect with close friends and make plans, said Nick Jaensch, one of the website’s creators.

‘Everyone has adapted to social networks,’ he said. ‘We wanted to answer specific problems that larger networks don’t answer.’

By creating the website, Jaensch said he and Keith Bessette, the other creator, were trying to answer the question ‘What’s going on tonight?’ The site then evolved to allow users to see what was going on and to make plans with friends.

Jaensch and Bessette began working on the site between their first and second years as MBA students at UConn and launched a preliminary version of the site in September 2009. The new version launched along with iPhone, BlackBerry and Android applications in January, Jaensch said. Users do not have to be college or university students to utilize the site.

The site, with about 2,800 users, utilizes Facebook and text messages to connect users and allows users to see events going on around their university. Shizzlr differentiates itself from Facebook because this site is for a user’s close group of friends, essentially the five to 20 people the user socializes with on a daily basis, Jaensch said.

‘The people you’ve called or texted in the past two weeks are who you’re going to add on Shizzlr,’ he said. ‘We still wanted to get the value of all the people you interact with on Facebook though.’

The site aggregates Facebook events happening in a user’s college or town, Jaensch said. The events could be university sponsored or could be bar nights, he said. Users can see the events and then utilize the group text messaging aspect of the site to make plans.

‘We organize Facebook events and present them in a different manner so you can make plans around them,’ he said.

Users can send mass text messages to a group of friends to discuss plans. The text messages are different from normal mass text messages because replies to the original message go to all the members instead of just the original sender, Jaensch said.

The two founders launched the site with money raised from friends and family, he said. Jaensch said the two began in an incubator program their last semester at UConn to further advance the preliminary website. They won a statewide business competition in Connecticut while they were at school to receive more funds.

‘We didn’t ever expect to win,’ he said. ‘That was when the buzz really started.’

Originally, the business plan for the founders was to target colleges and universities in the northeast, but Jaensch said the site took off and gained more users after The Associated Press published an article about it on Feb. 12.

Jaensch said he and Bessette were going to try to get back on their business plan and continue targeting schools in the northeast, but he said he was glad more people began using the site.

‘People signed on everywhere after the AP article,’ he said. ‘We had students in Texas and moms in Florida sign up.’

medelane@syr.edu

Published on March 1, 2011 at 12:00 pm

Contact Meghin: medelane@syr.edu | @meghinwithani