Building up social networks and tallying up friends has provided ample procrastination time for much of campus since Dartmouth's addition to the facebook.com database was launched Sunday evening.
By 10 p.m. Sunday night, just three hours after the Student Assembly sent out a BlitzMail message asking students to join an "interactive Dartmouth facebook," 1,000 students had already registered for the online site, according to site creator and Harvard University sophomore Mark Zuckerberg.
Upon registering, students can upload a picture of themselves -- or any picture, for that matter, as long as it does not infringe upon the website's no-pornography clause -- and create a profile listing everything from their field of study, dorm address and phone number to their favorite music and quote.
Dartmouth students can search for their friends by name, contact information and personal information, as well as send each other messages.
Students can also connect to other students outside of the Dartmouth community.
"People registered quicker than they did at any other school," Zuckerberg said of Dartmouth's response to the online community that resembles Friendster, a national web-based program, on a smaller scale.
As of 10 p.m. Monday, 1,781 people -- 1,682 students, 24 alumni and four faculty and staff members -- had registered from Dartmouth.
Facebook.com's presence at the College was organized by Diana Zhang '06, the chair of the Assembly's Student Services Committee, who heard about the Harvard site from Zuckerberg, a friend of Zhang's from high school.
"I knew that [the Assembly] had been trying to bring about an online face book, and this turned out to be better because it's interactive," Zhang said.
Zuckerberg set up the site and left it up to Zhang to advertise it at Dartmouth. "It'll explode whenever you advertise it," Zhang recalled Zuckerberg telling her. And indeed it did.
Zuckerberg said there are currently 12,796 friend connections among Dartmouth students on facebook.com, whose total collection of databases receives 5 million "hits" a day, due to a combination of its addictive nature and the program's ease of use.
But the origin of facebook.com did not always have such widespread approval -- especially among Harvard authorities.
Last November, in protest of the Harvard administration's delay in posting an updated facebook online, Zuckerberg seized student pictures from dormitory facebooks not intended to be public.
He then created a website that placed two random students' pictures on the page and allowed students to rank their classmates on attractiveness.
Within four hours, though, the site was shut down, and Zuckerburg's internet connection was terminated, he said.
Rather than being the student who caused more delay of the facebook because of privacy issues, Zuckerberg said he decided to create a site with "robust" proxy options so the administration could not object.
It took the psychology and computer science major only a few hours to set up the original site for Harvard on Feb. 6.
"It took off pretty quickly. Within a week, we had 4,000 people registered," Zuckerberg said.
Based on that overwhelmingly positive response, as well as extensive coverage in the Harvard Crimson, Zuckerberg said he "realized that it was cool at Harvard, and it seemed like it would be applicable at other schools too."
By the end of February, Zuckerberg had created websites for Columbia and Standard. Additionally, a facebook community was set up for Yale by March 2.
Zuckerberg noted that the response at Columbia and Yale was a bit slow because of competition from already existing online facebook sites.
Since creating Harvard's site, Zuckerberg has enlisted the help of fellow Harvard students Dustin Moskovitz and Eduardo Saverin to handle the inter-school network and business sides, respectively.
"Now we're looking at extending the site to larger schools," Zuckerberg said, citing New York University, Boston University, Berkeley and UCLA as examples.
At any given time during the day Zuckerberg said 1,000 people are logged into a network that serves Harvard, Columbia, Stanford and Yale.
For the time being, Dartmouth and Cornell are on a separate server, while Zuckerberg looks for a new host server to account for the increase in users.
"It blows my mind that people have actually used the site," Zuckerberg said. "It is meant to be a free-forum, general site. I am not dictating what people should use it for. I'm all about people expressing, and however people see fit to use the site, that's cool."
Some, though, had a different take.
"I'm not really sure what the advantages of it are since I already know who my friends are. I guess it helps you count them," Greta Milligan '04 remarked.
