Welcome to We Are Route One

Our group intends to assist in creating as well as market a social networking site in which students of the University of Maryland can exchange ideas, thoughts, events and various uploaded contents via the web in a privatized portal while also being able to discuss subjects in a public, anonymous-allowed forum as well.  There will also be programmed features within the site, such as an interchangeable map-to-calendar.  The name of the website will be called “We Are Route One” and will have the registered domain: www.wearerouteone.com.  

The idea for the project is to create a web-centric business with social networking elements which enable college students to share various information. It would be similar to Facebook, however, it will be hyper-localized, focusing on events happening on campus or around campus. Originally it will be College Park centric, but will be flexible enough to eventually expand to other colleges and universities as the site grows in popularity and demand increases.

We plan to have various ways of inputting events into the site. One way would be user-submitted and user-created events. There will be an interface where our users could set start and end dates and times of their events and the various privacy settings. Another way we will gather events is through scraping events of data from various websites. Some sources would include freestuff.umd.edu,cgi.umd.edu/calendar/today, ourumd.com, as well as the websites of venues around campus and metro-accessible locations in DC. For example, the site can pull data from furnightclub.com and show when a certain DJ will be performing. All of the events data can also be displayed on a map feature in order to increase user accessibility and make it easier for our users to find the locations and directions to the events which interest them.

The only way the website can sustain is by user-generated data.  Students at the University of Maryland will be able to create an account and contribute data free of charge, and can compete to win prizes if they contribute positively to the website.  We can market this website once it’s launched by word of mouth and by creating a Facebook event.

We will gain most of our revenue from advertising.  Because the site will be tailored initially to students at the University, we can monetize off Google Adwords and Adsense.  This would come free of charge and would allow Google to host some advertising on our site.  Depending on the number of unique users clicking those advertisements we could get upwards of hundreds of dollars a day from ad revenue.  We can also earn profit from specific advertising from local businesses in the College Park and DC area.  We can solicit them to pay a monthly fee in order to be featured on our site’s pages.  We can also offer a subscription service to businesses to have “featured” events on our calendar and map at an extra cost.