Princeton-Founded 'Friendsy' App Looking to Recapture Facebook's Early Magic
With 25,000 users and $200,000 in funding, the social network is now rolling out to all campuses nationwide.
By Geoff Weiss •
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Friendsy, a Princeton University-founded social network that is looking to recapture the early magic of Facebook, has announced its national rollout after cultivating 25,000 users and raising $200,000 in funding.
The app is the brainchild of Princeton seniors Michael Pinsky and Vaidhy Murti, and is only available to verified college students with email addresses ending in ".edu.' Pinsky and Vaidhy Murti created the company in 2013 because they felt as if competitors like Facebook, Tinder and Yik Tak failed to help students branch out of their social circles, according to the company.
"We're trying to do to Tinder what Facebook did to Myspace," Murti said in a statement. "Make it exclusive and clean."
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As the community grew, Pinsky and Murti developed iOS and Android apps for Friendsy, which started out as a website. They also launched a campus representative program in order to evangelize the product at other schools, according to USA Today.
Heretofore available on 40 campuses, Friendsy is now live at 1,600 colleges nationwide. Users can chat anonymously, compliment one another and make mutual matches -- both platonic and romantic. There are three possible kinds of requests -- friendship, hook up or date -- and the site has resulted in 200,000 such matches thus far, Pinsky says.
Additionally, Friendsy features a murmur feed, where users can post anonymous compliments or campus gossip, according to USA Today. However, this content is closely monitored by Friendsy in order to help prevent abuse.
Related: Where Famous Tech Founders Went to College (Infographic)
