will change this at some point--have been pretty busy with my current start up (yc s09, graffitigeo.com). i didn't want people to be getting spammed, though i'm sure this wouldn't be a big problem if i kept the plain text e-mails off and used captcha.
I like part of your idea, but really, just go ahead and let anyone sign in and sort introductions based on where you are if that's your point.
Why the exclusionary school thing? Isn't your point to enable people to find each other based on locale? Then just enable locale publication. Who gives a damn if you're currently or have been enrolled in the same institution. I for one, never used my school email. Well, that was 20 years ago, so maybe things have changed since then. But the only people I see using their alum email address in post-school life are ones that want to impress others with how much they paid for school.
wow, this is cool to see someone else submitting this here =] i built this because i didn't like that i couldn't connect with others on hacker news (though i can understand this was probably intentional to prevent spam).
i will fix the .edu email requirement eventually, though i originally intended this to be for undergrads on large campuses (such as illinois.edu) so they could easily find each other. if you're on this site and you spot someone else, you know from there that you have at least a few things in common: you most likely read pg's essays, you like to build stuff, you might be a little entrepreneurial, you're interested in programming or ui design.
larry and sergey met up because one of them was doing campus tours. i wonder how many start-ups would have been created if the individuals weren't physically too far apart and had a common place to meet up.
the colors were inspired by xcode's midnight theme.
I like the idea, but what I would love to see (being 6 years removed from Virginia Tech) is an alumni option. Just something simple to help fill in the gaps of the LinkedIn/Facebooks. So many of those searches have such a large result set that isn't necessarily relevant, which hinder the serendipitous finds of people you weren't looking for but would like to get in touch with.
Would be enough to display names that include graduation year, which you might be doing already for current students (I don't have a functional .edu anymore).
I haven't registered my alumni email yet. I hate my university's mail servers. Mail always takes a few minutes longer to arrive for some reason. I suppose it would look more professional than zackster/gmail.com. But meh. I have zacharyburt/gmail.com as a forwarding address, anyway.
