Columbus, Ohio-based Schoolfizz, which launched today, is easily summarized - it's Facebook plus Digg. Users create profile pages with a picture, and entering your school means that you can share stories with the whole world or just your fellow students. Stories are submitted on the site itself, and there doesn't seem to be a bookmarklet yet. You can also build a network of friends, explore stories by category and submit different types of media: photos, text, music and video clips. Like Digg, you can leave comments on stories, and voting for a news item is called "Fizzing It". You don't need a school email address to sign up.
Schoolfizz has a slick interface that raises expectations, but using the service reveals that it's a fairly uninspired clone of existing social news sites. It does, however, offer more originality than the hundreds of Pligg-based news sites that spring up every week. Founder Dennis Bailey points out that Facebook is already moving in this direction, and that could be a problem: Facebook Share allows users to post links, videos and photos to their pages, albeit within a private network of friends. Would students want to share links that are relevant to people at their college? Probably, but the usefulness of such a site relies on having critical mass in certain locations, something that's hard to achieve without real-world marketing. Schoolfizz is exploring content sharing relationships with student papers, which sounds like a good plan. I'm skeptical about whether they can make it a success, but by no means is Schoolfizz dead on arrival.
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