The new “unofficial” Temple website that has become an overnight success is the brainchild of two Drexel University students.
TheOwlWeb.com made its debut on Feb. 25.
Chalk messages with the web address appeared across campus, as did flyers that read, “The Owl Web, where good students go to be bad.”
By midnight, the site had over 12,000 page views and 125 registered users; currently, there are nearly 400 registered users.
OwlWeb creators Jason Kilpatrick and Michael Hagan said that they created the site to provide services that are currently unavailable to students.
These will include textbook swap listings, party listings, a professor rating system and a “Hook Ups” section, which will have student personal listings with photos.
The site also includes message boards for discussion and a section where students can post pictures.
They also want to begin offering a premium subscription, with features like chat rooms, if the site becomes popular enough.
The pair said they hope that students will begin submitting material for the site so that it will continue to grow.
They also said they want to begin having columnists write for the site on a regular basis.
The website already has a number of articles featured, although Hagan and Kilpatrick have posted all of them as of March 5.
A copyrighted article from the Feb. 26 online edition of The Onion, a humor newspaper, was submitted by Hagan and posted by Kilpatrick on March 3.
Hagan and Kilpatrick created a similar site at their school last year, but it was not successful, Hagan said.
He said that they created a site for Temple at the suggestion of friends who were students here.
Both have applied to the Temple business school’s graduate program.
“We have a lot of friends at Temple,” he said, “We hang at Temple a lot and as undergrads at Drexel, we realized that there are things we would want to change about our undergraduate years, like letting the book store rip us off, or not being able to meet as many people as we would have liked.”
They said they have not received negative feedback so far, but Hagan expects that to change once the professor ratings are functional.
“We want to strike fear into the bad teachers that know they are bad teachers so they have to change or face the consequences,” said Hagan.
Holli Powitzky can be reached at hollip@temple.edu.
Be the first to comment