Web sites click on campus

Gone are the days when "new faces" booklets were the sole directories to greet college students on campus in the fall.

Today, a new breed of directory Web sites is proliferating on campuses, and students across the country — nearly 1 million of them — are scrambling to put their best, quirkiest or sexiest faces forward in an attempt to impress old friends and, better yet, identify new ones.

By Claire Bourne, Special for USA TODAY

http://www.usatoday.com/tech/webguide/internetlife/2004-11-23-campus-connection-usat_x.htm

Since its launch at Harvard in February, http://www.Thefacebook.com — the most popular of these souped-up sites — has made campus communication and socializing easier and faster than ever. Students can post photos, contact information and often extensive personal information. Once they’ve crafted a profile, members can begin networking with friends both on their campus and other member campuses.

The site’s widespread use is also changing the way the college crowd interacts. Instead of getting to know a classmate over coffee or through mutual friends, students can now access a goldmine of information about their peers online.

Though Thefacebook.com is not the only site of its kind, its easy-to-use interface and continuing word-of-mouth publicity have found it a loyal following.

"If you didn’t know about Thefacebook.com or weren’t on Thefacebook.com, you were definitely behind schedule," says Kristin Dukes, a senior at Rice University in Houston.

Still, other sites boast even more technological bells and whistles. ConnectU.com, founded by three recent Harvard graduates, offers users a truly interactive experience thanks to features such as online forums and Web logs. According to co-founder Cameron Winklevoss, the site’s discussion boards were particularly lively during the buildup to the presidential election.

Members of CampusNetwork.com, started at Columbia University, can participate in cyber polls and keep an online journal.

It was through CampusNetwork’s journal feature that Columbia University junior Leslie Moore met classmate Cody Hess, now one of her best friends.

After discovering Hess was from Southlake, Texas — just outside Moore’s hometown of Dallas — she started sending him online messages. "The next thing we knew, we were having lunch and hanging out in real life," she recalls. Moore says the chances of meeting Hess without the help of an online community "were pretty much nil," since he is a computer science major and she’s studying neuroscience.

"Columbia has a very uninviting student center, and CampusNetwork has sort of grown to take its place," Moore says.

And that’s exactly what CampusNetwork.com founder Adam Goldberg intended when he created what he claims to be "the original" college online community in August 2003. Goldberg, a student at Columbia’s School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, developed SEASCommunity.com independently of the university to help students there have a sense of community. Within three months, 85% of the engineering school had signed up. The site later evolved into CampusNetwork.com, which Goldberg says is expanding to other campuses.

Winklevoss says he, his brother Tyler and their friend Divya Narendra "dreamed up" the idea of a ConnectU.com network in late 2002. "We said to ourselves, ‘There are over half a million students in the Boston area, and there isn’t a good way to meet them.’ " ConnectU.com finally launched in May, three months after Thefacebook.com made its debut.

Only users with college or university e-mail addresses ending in ".edu" can join these networks. Students can e-mail all three sites to sign their school up as a member college. They don’t need official approval from the institution, and all the services are free.

While ConnectU.com users can automatically communicate with all member students nationwide, users of Thefacebook.com can, by default, only access information about peers at their own college. They can add acquaintances at other schools to their list of friends only with those acquaintances’ permission. "Each user has complete autonomy over who sees what information she wants to display," says Christopher Hughes, Thefacebook.com’s spokesman.

The overwhelming popularity of these sites has some experts worried that college students’ increasing reliance on the Internet may stunt their social development.

"These technologies are great when they are used as sorting mechanisms for people to find each other and develop face-to-face relationships," says Adam Weinberg, a sociologist and the dean of the college at Colgate University, Hamilton, N.Y. "But too often they become escape valves for students to avoid the situations that are healthy and normal parts of college life."

Opinion on Thefacebook.com’s staying power among users is split.

Ivy Lynn, a sophomore at Washington University in St. Louis, has been using Thefacebook.com since April. She says the site "loses its sparkle quickly."

Her classmate Sarah Laaff disagrees. "Some people are labeling this as a ‘fad,’ " she says. "But so far, it doesn’t look like it’s going to fade. With the addition of new schools, I think exactly the opposite. It’s booming now, and I can’t imagine that this will stop any time soon."