If somebody wants to work with web development, a good project at college level will be related to open api. Like you people can develop your own social network using google open social api. This will help you a lot. Such a project will count when you come out in real world. Many sites provides the web services, you can try using those services into your project....like google map, weather forcast, amazon's web services etc....You can work to make facebook applications also using facebook's own api....there are many options.
Title: Video segmentation or image retrieval/mining
Areas: image/video processing, data mining algorithms
Description: Application for semantic video segmentation, image/video understanding, annotation, and access.
Skills: Java, C++, MATLAB
Title: Word guessing game
Area: Games, algorithms
Description: Use genetic algorithms (GA) to simulate and find the optimal solution.
Possible platforms: Java, C++, MATLAB
Title: Portals
Area: Internet technologies
Description: Development and porting of any one of the following: Customer Relations Management Portal, Communication Portal (email collaboration), Project Management Portal Current Architecture, Database redesign
Platforms: Java, SQL, PHP, Javascript HTML and CSS. PostgreSQL database...
Title: Google Intelligence
Areas: Data retrieval, image recognition, graphics
Description: Using the Google Maps API classify map contents.
Possible Platform(s): Java, C/C++, MATLAB
Title: Data Mining: Weather Prediction/Web data/other science datasets
Areas: Data Mining, Algorithms
Description: Using data from the National Climatic Data Center (http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/) try to predict weather at a given time period from previous time periods.
Using data from web traffic try to predict usage or other features.
Using data from other science data sets predict events (i.e. cancer incidence).
Platform(s): Java, C++, Perl, Python, MATLAB or existing data mining tools
Input any php code and calculate complexity of the code. I search a lot about such tool but couldn't find beside one, which is also in development phase (not full). It is called "lint" inspired from MATLAB's mlint. So this could be a good college project.