It was once the stomping ground of an adolescent Facebook, but now that the site has shifted its focus, a new social networking startup is looking capture the attention of the college crowd.

And while College.com is looking for new members, the company also has its eye on other systems already in place at the University.

With Facebook and Myspace at the top of the social networking market, College.com is attempting to break in to the scene with something new, according to Whittney Laws, the site’s public relations manager. She said since both Facebook and MySpace deal with an unbounded age range, they are in a different category than College.com, which only caters to college students.

“We do not consider Facebook to be our direct competition,” Laws said.

Natasha Vos, a freshman in animal science, said she joined Facebook in high school. She said she doesn’t have a problem with making Facebook accessible to everyone.

“I don’t see why it should just be a college network,” Vos said.

Sam Marks, marketing director at College.com, said the site also plans to keep a slick visual identity.

“The last thing we’ll ever do is start to look like MySpace,” he said.

According to Marks, the site is custom-tailored to college life.

“Academics is the section we’ll place the most emphasis on,” he said.

College.com boasts course pages that include a forum, a place to upload flash cards and a way to rate and review professors. The site already knows which professors teach which classes and has basic information for all of them.

There is also a section for joining and organizing Greek chapters.

Marks said these course pages may give College.com an extra edge in the future, as the company may offer itself as a replacement to the Vista online instruction software once it is well established and developed.

But Lou Harrison, the University’s director of information technology for Distance Education and Learning Technology Applications, said he isn’t so sure.

Although Harrison said the University is investigating “other alternatives to Vista right now,” sites like College.com may not be appropriate for replacing the program, which he said drew $120,000 from student fees last year.

“As a general rule, the campus is loathe to use ad-supported sites,” Harrison said.

However, while the Vista replacement plan may not pan out for College.com, its biggest problem is gaining enough members to be useful. A search on the site for N.C. State students turns up fewer than 100 users.

After viewing the site, Matthew Haentschke, a junior in computer engineering, said it looked like “a more encompassing Facebook,” and that it “might be a fairly decent homepage if even just a small amount of people were using it.”

But without other members, Haentschke said he would be unlikely to switch from Facebook.

“Unless they manage to get a lot of people converting to this site then the function I use Facebook for will still be covered by Facebook,” Haentschke said.

Marks said the company is depending on members themselves to promote the site.

“To get the critical mass we need, we’ll need to grow by word of mouth,” Marks said.

While word of mouth is nice, College.com is hedging its bets with an incentive: money.

Marks said that students will receive 50 cents for every person they refer to College.com.

The Web site invites users to “earn hundreds of dollars per month.” But that’s not all.

C.R. Townes, a freshman in business management, is working as the campus ambassador for College.com.

“I’m pretty sure that once they customize it for N.C. State, it’ll take off,” he said. “If we get 1,000 students from NCSU they’ll throw a party.”