With the runaway growth of of document-sharing site Scribd, a number of competitors are popping up. The most interesting ones are customizing their sites to be useful to communities of people who want to share documents on specific topics.
Docstoc, for example, just launched as a doc sharing site for professionals like lawyers and businesspeople. We’ve recently come across a young startup called TheCollegeFreeway that’s trying to bring easier document-sharing to college classrooms.
When you first go to TheCollegeFreeway, you’ll see a list of the most popular lecture notes, practice tests, problem sets and other docs uploaded from students at Cornell, Santa Clara, Stanford, USC, Princeton or other schools currently listed on the site. Screenshot below.
With the click of a button, you can opt to log in as your Facebook identity and see the list of documents shared by people in your college network. The site uses your Facebook profile information to match you up with notes from others at your school. This lets you avoid creating a user profile and picking out your college.
Instead of going to class and taking notes, just go to TheCollegeFreeway to get them — a way of saving time for Facebook-addicted college students.
The Facebook profile feature is a great example of how Facebook’s user information can be used as a way to more easily access other sites on the web, a concept we’ve been waiting to see applied well. Most Facebook applictions are embedded directly within Facebook, via its developer platform — and they often lack realy utility as most are mindless games.
If you want to upload a document, you can choose to make it private and only share it with designated people on the site. You can also register anonymously if you want to upload the types of documents for classes that might get you in trouble.
When you upload a document, you match your it with the title of the course its related to, the school department and other information, including the ISBN numbers of textbooks used in the course. Matching up textbooks between campuses is a way for students to find relevant notes from peers on other campuses.
Like Scribd and others, TheCollegeFreeway uses Adobe’s Flash Paper to display documents and lets you import from PDF, Word and other standard formats. Screenshot below.
The site is still in an early public beta and is iterating quickly on a somewhat confusing interface. It has already managed to get a couple thousand documents, mostly notes from tech classes at Cornell and USC. There are over one hundred documents for math classes at Cornell, for example.
For those concerned about copyright issues, the site has the usual disclaimers and terms of service here.
Scribd already has a large number of education-related documents on the site, but is not designing features for note-sharing college students like TheCollegeFreeway. On the latter site’s to-do list, for example, is building an application within Facebook that lets people join courses — a good way to funnel those people from Facebook to TheCollegeFreeway.
The company is currently based out of the Plug and Play Tech Center in Sunnyvale, California.
