Student life has changed a lot since 2005 when the idea to create a Social Network Service (SNS) for students in the School of Systems Engineering at the University of Reading was conceived and went live in 2006. Over the next few years, this service (known as RedGloo) was offered to students at the university with the aim of supporting their formal and, more importantly, informal education. RedGloo was set up to help students identify others with similar interests, as well as to provide a service to enable them to blog and share reflections on formal learning practices. Weller (2011) compares how digital scholarship has changed in the later part of the first decade of the 2000s, with the ready availability of e-resources and the development of a global social network changing scholarly practice. However, in 2005, SNSs were a new idea and relatively few students had accounts on any such services. At the same time commercial SNSs developed, and changes in student usage were observed. Today, many, if not most, students will use Facebook or a similar SNS to socialise generally with each other, in 2011 up to 99% of US college students were reported to use Facebook (Junco, 2012). This paper reflects on the development of RedGloo and its use by over 1000 students between 2006 and 2011. It is not an experiment that can be repeated, as technologies have changed significantly over the years and SNSs are no longer an emerging technology but available to everyone. Although focus groups were run throughout the first 3 years of the experiment, in retrospect, a more research-oriented approach to collecting data on how RedGloo was used could have been taken, alongside regular reviews. At the time, however, service provision was a priority, and the focus groups and informal discussions were aimed at improving the service. (Contains 1 figure.)