Every time Tim Pittman logs on to Thefacebook, a Web site that displays photographs and short biographies of college students, he is linked to 120 of his classmates, friends, and acquaintances.
That can be a handy tool when he wants to fire off some quick e-mail messages, says Mr. Pittman, a sophomore at Harvard University. But it is only part of the site’s allure. From his friends’ profiles, Mr. Pittman can use the free service to link to more than 4,000 other students: casual acquaintances, high-school classmates, and a lot of people he has never met. He says he often browses through that expanded list looking for people who share his interests.
“A lot of my friends send messages to other people who they saw on Thefacebook,” he says. “I mainly use it to waste time.”
The student-run service puts a digital spin on the illustrated address books that many colleges pass out to students early in the academic year. Like those booklets, known as “facebooks,” the Web site helps students put names with faces.
But this facebook works on a larger scale, allowing students to view peers at a number of different institutions. And it adds some new features. Students and alumni can use it to send messages either through e-mail or Thefacebook’s own message system. They can also create personal Web pages where they share information about their hobbies and interests, and, in essence, create virtual clubhouses where they control which friends and classmates are allowed to join.
Thefacebook was created in February on a whim by Mark Zuckerberg, a student at Harvard. Just a few months later, its founders have brought it to 32 institutions -- usually getting a rush of members. At the University of Chicago, where the service made its debut in May, about 2,400 students registered to use the site in its first week.
The grass-roots success of Thefacebook is mirrored by that of a number of other social-network sites that have recently hit campuses. And a spate of colleges have adopted online-dating sites that offer students the chance to test their compatibility with their classmates. Many students also use a nationwide site called Friendster, which began in 2002 and has grown to millions of users.
As college students continue to devise new ways to use their computers as social resources, some researchers say services like Thefacebook may provide them with an unprecedented window into students’ workaday concerns and how they structure their social lives. “My sense is that most students who use the site are still in the curiosity phase,” says Michael Kearns, a professor of computer and information science at the University of Pennsylvania. “But if they start using it more and more for practical purposes, it will be a new way to find out a little more about their social network.”
Designed for Students
When Mr. Zuckerberg, a sophomore at Harvard studying computer science and psychology who tinkered with online projects in his spare time, started Thefacebook, he never imagined its moving beyond his campus. In fact, it started as a joke, when he designed a Web site called Facemash that placed two photos of Harvard students side by side and asked users to vote on which person was more attractive.
Mr. Zuckerberg was already using Friendster, like many of his classmates, and he decided that a Harvard-only version of the service could be a hit. Like its model, Thefacebook allows users to connect to one another by creating their own webs of friends and acquaintances. But Mr. Zuckerberg designed Thefacebook’s personal-profiles section with college students in mind: In addition to typical categories, such as hobbies and dating status, students can list the classes they take, the dormitories they live in, and what they plan to do over the summer. Those features -- and the fact that the site is restricted to students and alumni with college e-mail addresses -- give Thefacebook a closer-knit feel than Friendster, which casts a much wider net.
To allay privacy concerns, Mr. Zuckerberg allows students using Thefacebook to decide how accessible their personal information should be. Users can make their profiles available to anyone registered for the service or restrict them to students at their own colleges, residents of their dormitories, or people they recognize as friends.
The service was instantly popular: Within a week of its debut, almost 1,000 students had signed up.
Mr. Zuckerberg recruited his roommate, Chris Hughes, to serve as the public-relations manager for the service, and another friend, Eduardo Saverin, to help assess their chances of turning the site into a successful business. They had to buy additional computer servers to accommodate all the users at Harvard -- a group that now includes about 7,000 students and 2,500 alumni.
“We originally just released it thinking it was a fun project,” says Mr. Hughes. “But so many people signed up so quickly we were blown away.” (Mr. Zuckerberg declined to speak to a reporter, referring all questions to Mr. Hughes.)
Over the past three months, Mr. Zuckerberg and his partners released local versions of Thefacebook at every Ivy League college, as well as at the other institutions, including Stanford University and the Universities of Chicago and Virginia. The network’s clientele ballooned to nearly 120,000.
For many of the newest registrants, the network offers a simple chance to build a home page and show it off to friends. For others, the site is a topic of conversation and curiosity. Agustina Sacerdote, a senior at the University of Pennsylvania, heard about Thefacebook from the student newspaper -- and then from friends who asked her to join. At first, she linked to a small group of close friends, but soon she started adding new acquaintances, students at other institutions, and former high-school classmates.
Now, her facebook account includes links to 117 friends. And her “social network” -- a list generated by the service that includes everyone whose profile she can reach in three or fewer steps -- has ballooned to more than 3,700.
Ms. Sacerdote hasn’t used the site to meet new friends. “To be honest, I don’t know what I use it for,” Ms. Sacerdote says. “It’s just for fun, and an excellent way to procrastinate.”
Arranging Dates Online
But at Harvard -- where Mr. Hughes says “facebook” has already become a verb, meaning to look someone up using the Web site -- many students have already found specific uses for the network. Some set up study groups by searching for other students taking their courses. Others offer to link to each other’s profiles when they meet in dining halls and lounges.
And a number of undergraduates have used Thefacebook to tackle the most perilous aspect of Harvard’s social scene: dating.
“There’s definitely a lot of people who send messages to people in their class that they’d like to have coffee with,” says Mr. Hughes. “I think most everyone knows of a few people who have gone on a few dates because of Thefacebook,” he says. By examining profiles of potential love interests, he says, students can attempt to determine if they’ll get along before setting off on a first date.
That logic has been taken a step further by a similar site at Wesleyan University, called WesMatch, that focuses on making love connections. The service, which requires students to fill out a humorous questionnaire and then translates the results into compatibility rankings, was founded by a pair of Wesleyan students more than two years ago. But only in the past year has it become a campus craze. Now almost all students on the campus -- 2,500 out of 2,700 -- have set up WesMatch profiles. The Web site was recently copied at four institutions, including Williams College, where some 1,700 students have signed up.
“WesMatch really has become a community thing,” says Dan Stillman, one of the site’s developers. “It’s a way of taking dating and making it into something less serious that people can laugh about, and I think people kind of like that.”
He and Mr. Hughes agree that the principle behind the popularity of their sites is simple: The networks make meeting people seem like a casual process. “There’s an awkwardness if you meet someone at a party and ask them to dinner on a social-networking site,” says Mr. Hughes. “But I think if you do the same thing through e-mail, it’s worse. The reaction would be more like ‘Who is this kid, and what is he doing?’”
Research Opportunity
Other students say Thefacebook makes the Web, and their universities, seem more manageable by representing them as simple sets of social connections. “I like the fact that it decreases the perceived size of the university by showing how people are connected to one another,” says Joshua Evans, a student at Penn who considers himself a devotee of Thefacebook.
Mr. Kearns, the Penn professor, decided to investigate Thefacebook when his students gave it the highest praise an online social network can get: Because it has no noncollegiate users, it’s “better than Friendster.”
For Mr. Kearns, the rise of such sites isn’t just a curiosity; it’s “an extraordinary research opportunity.” The professor’s work applies principles of social networks to the science of computer programming -- a combination of themes that academics have only recently started to explore, he says.
Friendster and Thefacebook, he argues, bring something to his field that researchers have never had before: hard evidence. “Traditionally the only way to get empirical data on social networking was to bring a notebook to the bar,” he says. “With the Internet, it’s finally possible to measure social activity.” For Mr. Kearns, that means having his students study their profiles to see whom they link to and what they do online.
In “Networked Life,” a course he teaches about the social aspects of computer networks, Mr. Kearns asked students like Ms. Sacerdote and Mr. Evans to create their own Friendster profiles. He then encouraged them to look up their peers’ profiles online, and watched to see who linked to whom.
Mr. Kearns says the exercise helps him demonstrate concepts like “preferential attachment,” which states that in most networks, a small percentage of people will be somehow linked to almost all of their peers. “We can graph the number of connections everyone on a network has,” he says, “and it shows that the rich get richer.”
His students “definitely get it,” he says. “They can talk about network properties broadly or specifically because they’ve lived with technology growing up, and they’ve lived with it in college.”
Online Encounters
College students, in other words, expect to mediate their meetings in the flesh with contacts in the digital world.
Nearly every student talks regularly with friends using e-mail and instant-messaging systems, says Albert Ip, another of Mr. Kearns’s students. “I think online communication augments real-life encounters for most of us.”
The creators of Thefacebook are hoping their captive audiences can help them turn the service into a profitable business. Last month the site made its first foray into advertising, running a series of announcements for local events at Harvard. And Mr. Hughes says the site’s creators are weighing offers from a few advertising firms, which, he says could help subsidize the cost of the network -- now more than $1,000.
But beyond a few small advertisers, it remains to be seen whether Thefacebook can be a money maker, says Mr. Kearns. He argues that the service will not be a long-term hit with students and investors unless its creators more clearly define its audience. “In a year or two, is it going to be a network for alumni? Is it going to be a dating service?” he asks. “I think the site needs to develop a function that e-mail and course Web sites can’t duplicate.”
Mr. Hughes says Thefacebook will answer those questions in the summer, by bringing the service to more than 100 colleges and introducing new features. He declined to describe those features but said they would “bring social networking to the next level.”
For the time being, he says, the service’s popularity is accomplishment enough.
“Even though it’s 80 degrees and sunny, there are still 200 people logged in to the site from Harvard right now,” he says. “That’s something else.”
http://chronicle.com Section: Information Technology Volume 50, Issue 38, Page A29