Contributing to the procrastinatory nature of undergraduates since February 4, 2004.

Augmenting the pressures of checking people’s AIM away messages moment to moment and obsessively needing to know what is going on in the lives of others, is another online medium for internet stalking. That’s right: thefacebook.com phenomenon has been sweeping college campuses since the site was launched from Harvard University in February of 2004. Masterminded by Mark E. Zuckerberg, junior at Harvard, thefacebook.com boasts a membership of 1.4 million users from 295 schools across the country. The site was modeled after Friendster, a popular online meet and greet tool, but has gained significant momentum among the collegiate crowd because it is tailored specifically to the needs of college students and their insatiable desire to know random information about one another.

So what exactly is thefacebook.com?

“We don’t view the site as an online community – we bill it as a directory that is reinforcing physical community. What exists on the site is a mirror image of what exists in real life,” says Zuckerberg.

A university e-mail address at one of the schools hosted by thefacebook.com is all you need to be just clicks away from the profiles, pictures, and personal information of over a million young, bored college students just like you. The site has a variety of useful, interesting, and sometimes puzzling features that range from a directory of people registered in your classes to a detail that allows one facebooker to “poke” another.

University at Buffalo sophomore and business administration major Lindsey Rohde says, “Poking is basically a way to flirt with someone on facebook.” Rohde admits to checking her facebook ten times a day, minimum.

What has been dubbed as the new “click clique” by the Washington Post has a wide variety of uses for students. The propitious spin on the facebook’s uses are its ability to connect students in classes for academic purposes, to allow one to find people who share common interests, to connect long lost high school friends, and to provide yet another form of online communication. In practice, however, the facebook can become a weapon in the hands of a person with too much time and too few real-life friends.

For example, when asked if he had ever been creepily contacted by someone he didn’t really know via facebook, one undergraduate communication and management major, who wishes to remain anonymous, relays one instance of internet confrontation: “A guy requested to be my friend and I didn’t know who he was so I declined. He tried again and I declined again. He then IMed me, despite my profile saying, ‘Interested in Women’ and he was uncomfortably up front with me… if you know what I mean.”

Although I’m sure that many of us have our stories of encountering people who come off as a little too “facebook forward,” for the most part, the facebook is quite successful in strengthening those relationships that exist between fringe friends. Just like the six degrees of Kevin Bacon, everybody knows somebody that knows somebody that knows somebody. By checking out your friend’s friends you establish something in common even before you meet a person. It gives you a chance to meet people with the appropriate level of nonchalance and provides conceivable reasons to get in touch with someone you might fancy. Of course, if you attempt to “make them your friend” and they “reject” you, you still have the protection of online detachment necessary for self-preservation.

Another way for people to gather according to common interests is to actually form online groups within their university. For example, some of UB’s more popular facebook groups: People who think the credit card guy in the commons is shady (population 109), Fans of Family Guy Club (228), and UB Wasted (176). The site even links people who are in groups to related groups where other people are involved.

Thefacebook.com’s inexorable pull is positively undeniable. As the site expands to include more college campuses, students are logging on at alarming rates at the desperate requests of their friends who have already been sucked into the facebook addiction. The only solace non-members may take is in knowing that soon they will be invited into a world where everyone you know already knows everyone you know.