If you've been to college sometime in the past decade, you might have run up against Blackboard. It's an online assignment system that students generally dread logging into, because it usually means new work or more brown-nosing questions from that showoff in your class. That's not Blackboard's fault, though. To show they want to make things easier on their user base, the students, Blackboard is now on Facebook with an app called Blackboard Sync.A quick Google search shows that some colleges have been hacking together their own mashups of Blackboard and Facebook, which suggests to us that there's already a demand for this product. Granted, the move could have come sooner: now that Facebook is increasingly used by middle-aged PR officers who want to network -- heard of LinkedIn, guys? -- a lot of users are going to pass this by. For the college kids who still log into Facebook every day and use it as a primary mode of communication with friends, this is great. While you're making plans to go out drinking at the nearest fraternity, take a quick look at the Blackboard app to make sure you won't wake up with a last-minute assignment to finish.
The business of Facebook application development has been dying off because nobody wants to lace their profile with annoying pirates, ninjas, mummies, or whatever the latest trend is. Applications that actually have value to Facebook's natural demographic are scarce, so we hope Blackboard will turn out to be useful for students and set an example of what Facebook apps could be doing.
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
5-14-2008 @ 5:20PM
Jnetty said...
Blackboard was so useless. My professors never updated it when I was in college.
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5-14-2008 @ 10:42PM
neko said...
my professors use it alright. it's still useless. and packed with frames and ancient java forms that crash firefox.
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5-14-2008 @ 11:36PM
BananaBoat said...
Not to mention that you get locked out of Blackboard based tests every two F***ing seconds, and then only the professor can unlock them (not tech support at your school), so you have to wait till business hours, which defeats the purpose of online classes through Blackboard.
Facebook is the LAST place I want to hear about my blackboard assignments. Good thing it's summer now, and I don't have any assignments
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