Today’s NYTimes had any interesting article called, “Homework Help Site Has a Social Networking Twist”.  Poojan Nath is the founder of Piazza a website created to help students post questions and get answers.

“The whole idea of Piazza stems from the dynamics that I observed at Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur, an elite engineering school in India where Ms. Nath went to school.  There, she had seen how her male classmates collaborated on problem sets.  From the sidelines I saw how effective it was to get immediate help, from peers in the same room,” Ms. Nath, 30, said.

Although there are rival services, like Blackboard, an education software company, Piazza’s platform is specifically designed to speed response times. The site is supported by a system of notification alerts, and the average question on Piazza will receive an answer in 14 minutes.