Otherwise, for pair or group studying over the internet, I haven't been satisfied with anything that I've seen. That adds some difficulty to the social interactions once the connections are made, and anything that can be done to ease the introductions would be helpful. For physical meetings, it seems like the initial communication might be 'Hi, I'm so-and-so, if you're interested, we can meet in the student library at 10:00AM', or something like that. For Internet-based studying, I'm not sure how that interaction should go. Something like 'Skype me @mynamehere at 10AM EST and we'll study together' doesn't quite seem right to me, because IMing or IRC seems too cumbersome and slow to be useful for studying. I think I'm just ignorant of the tools that can be useful here, but what I've seen so far appears lacking to me.
Another thing, how do I actually find a list of my buddies? OK, I see them now under 'Notifications'. That's unexpected. I was looking for 'My Buddies' or something like that. I'm not sure what 'Notifications' would be for.
.. and the gray overlay does highlight the search bar, I just didn't immediately notice it. My eye is on the 'Search' button that I just clicked, and that gets covered by the overlay, so it gave me the feeling of 'WTF just happened?'
I sometimes feel like a bit of a dick when I critique the work of others, so I'm thankful that you're not taking this the wrong way. In fact, the only reason why I'm looking at this at all is because I think you've done something cool here, and it's potentially very useful. I think you're doing a good job here, and I hope the best for your project.
