After months of database dominance, thefacebook.com will have a rival on campus.
Columbia's student-designed CampusNetwork was released to Dartmouth this weekend in hopes of making the same splash as it did at Columbia, where 75 percent of undergraduates are members.
Dartmouth was selected to be the first school to receive CampusNetwork, an online community similar in intent to thefacebook.com, because it was the most technically advanced, said program spokesman and Columbia junior Wayne Ting. The CampusNetwork team reasoned that BlitzMail had already created an online community and that students would therefore be open to a more interactive community.
According to Ting, the most popular feature on CampusNetwork is the groups function, which allows for the creation of miniature online communities within the larger school population. Clubs, Greek organizations and other student organizations can use the groups for advertisements and as forums for discussion. More unorthodox student alliances also use the groups to organize meetings and to meet people, such as the SinglePeople group, a forum for unattached Columbia students.
CampusNetwork also features an online journal, an unlimited photo gallery, school groups and a music page, bringing together numerous online services, in one campus website.
Such functions distinguish CampusNetwork from thefacebook.com, which Ting described as inferior.
"It's is not just about stagnant introductions and adding more friends," Ting said. "It's about bringing people closer together."
Columbia students agree that CampusNetwork leads to much more communication between students than thefacebook.com.
Ting's sentiment is a common one on the Columbia campus. Last Spring, when Harvard junior Mark Zuckerberg opened up thefacebook.com at Columbia University, just days before its release at Dartmouth, many devoted members to CUCommunity, the former name for CampusNetwork, expressed their outrage through a Google-bombing campaign, attempting to sabotage thefacebook.com's success.
Google-bombing is a new technique intended to manipulate the search results yielded by the popular search engine, Google. For example, the search term "miserable failure" yields the biography of President George W. Bush on the official White House website.
Columbia's Google-bomb campaign, organized by Columbia junior Cody Hess, only met limited success. Though his proposal was initially lauded by numerous CUCommunity-faithfuls, Columbia students failed to gain enough support to link "CUCommunity ripoff" with thefacebook.com.
Columbia students, however, have remained loyal to CampusNetwork.
"I consider Facebook more of a database," said Columbia sophomore Shakthi Jothianandan. "CampusNetwork is a much more of a community."
Ting predicted that Dartmouth would be a good litmus test of CampusNetwork's staying power.
"We're still using this as an experiment," Ting said of Campus Network's extension to the Dartmouth campus. "We hope to connect schools all over the world, all in a campus environment."
