Wish you could have gotten tickets to the Ohio State University vs. University of Texas game? If you would have checked out FaceTIX, chances are you could have.
Two Virginia Tech University graduates, David Gentzel and Nathan Jones, created the Web site www.facetix.com, which offers students an opportunity to sell, purchase or swap tickets with their friends or fellow students.
According to Jones, in order to access the Web site, a user must log in using his or her Facebook.com account information. Once successfully logged in, FaceTIX.com is able to obtain a list of the user's friends and connections via Facebook's application programming interface, or API.
According to Facebook, the API is a service that provides a way for other applications to access Facebook's content on behalf of Facebook members.
"But that's it for our relationship with Facebook," Jones said. "FaceTIX is a completely independent site."
Gentzel and Jones first came up with the idea as they thought back upon their first year at college, when they struggled to get tickets to any Virginia Tech football game.
"Dave and I are pretty into college football," Jones said. "It gets frustrating when you can't get tickets to an event that you really want to go to."
Jones said that their main goal was to provide a way for any student to attend any sporting event of their choice.
The concept for the selling and purchasing of tickets online with the use of a Web site is not a new one; many students are familiar with eBay, a Web site that offers users the ability to post tickets for sale or purchase them from another user.
But Gentzel believes that FaceTIX.com has made the ability to buy and sell tickets a little more private.
"Mainly it's the whole personal aspect of the site that separates us from sites like eBay," Gentzel said. "It makes the whole process a little more personable."
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Another aspect of FaceTIX.com that is absent in the world of eBay is the blunt discouragement of ticket scalping - in other words, making a profit from the sale of a ticket.
Jones said he and Gentzel do their best to monitor the site for scalping, yet admits that chances are someone will eventually take advantage of a sale. Jones added that to his knowledge, most universities have policies against turning a profit on a ticket to a collegiate sporting event.
The most sought after tickets at the moment are those for college football, but Gentzel believes that the demand will change with the sporting season.
"We want to try and get a decent base for football, and then transfer into basketball and other sports," Gentzel said.
Sporting events, however, are not the only events that FaceTIX.com can provide for its users. "While there is a concentration on sports, any kind of ticket can be sold, like for concerts and any other nonsporting event," Jones said.
While widely available, FaceTIX.com is most heavily used by Virginia Tech students, where the site was first introduced. Yet Gentzel says that more and more students from different schools are beginning to access the site.
"This is basically one of those things where its word of mouth," Gentzel said. "The key factor is waiting for people to tell other people."
Miami University junior Nathan Mix said that FaceTIX.com is definitely a way that he would try to get tickets to any Ohio State game.
"I'd like to get tickets to the Ohio State vs. (University of) Michigan game this year," Mix said. "FaceTIX.com sounds like an efficient way to get a hold of a ticket at a reasonable price."
While FaceTIX.com is only a few weeks old, Jones is pleased with the usage of the site, which is available to students at any school that is also recognized by Facebook.
"I'm very happy with the site, and I hope others are too," Jones said.
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