BY MELISSA PHRUKSACHART

In print | September 2, 2004

At a school as small as Swarthmore, the people-watching can get dull pretty quickly. After a semester or two, you can be fairly confident that you have registered almost every Swattie’s face. However, there is now a new venue for idle messaging and innocuous stalking: thefacebook.com.

This social networking website for elite college students has finally arrived at Swarthmore after being available only to Ivy League schools and a few large universities since its February 2004 inception. Thefacebook, which asks students to create detailed personal profiles and allows them to search for friends, was made available to Swarthmore College students in late August. Since then, more than 300 current Swatties have signed up – meaning over 20 percent of the campus has indulged at least once in the guilty pleasures of narcissistic profile-making, personal photo posting, peer profile-critiquing, crush analyzing, and all-around obsessive collecting of “friends.”

The phenomenon began at Harvard University in January 2004, according to a wired.com article. Mark Zuckerberg, then a sophomore at Harvard, created the site to allow his fellow classmates to connect to one another by listing their interests, classes and activities. Thefacebook soon exploded in popularity at Harvard and was launched to the public in February 2004. First to be added were the other Ivy League schools, followed by large universities and liberal arts colleges. Thefacebook network now includes 57 institutions, ranging from Yale University to Swarthmore to the University of Virginia.

The format of the site is similar to the popular social networking website friendster.com, with a few collegiate twists. After the user is registered, he or she creates a profile containing “my contact info,” “my personal info,” “my summer plans,” “my courses” and more. There is space for users to provide details as personal (and salacious, by Swat standards) as sexual preferences, relationship status, political views, course schedules and dorm rooms. Many users choose to include pictures as well.

Fortunately, with such intimate details floating around, security at Thefacebook is tight. Unless users have added one another as friends, they can access only others’ names, pictures and schools.

To find “friends,” users input names and can search not only by college but high school as well. Most users’ lists of friends contain a mix of schools, broadening their social networks. For those pessimistic about the Quaker Matchbox, this is a valuable resource. For others, Thefacebook allows them to get to know Swatties they may only know by face more intimately. “I think Thefacebook is convenient because it’s part of the Swarthmore community. It’s a more detailed Cygnet,” Wee Chua ’06 said.

After that, there isn’t much else. Users can message each other, search for new friends, and keep up with each other’s profiles. Thefacebook also includes a curious option called “Poking.” Each profile has a link saying, “Poke him/her!” If you choose to poke someone, they receive an alert saying that you have poked them. Their only option is either to ignore it or to poke you back. Nothing more and nothing less—leaving some users disappointed by Thefacebook’s limited capabilities. “You sign up, and you get friends. You scroll and look at them: ’I’ve got this many friends.’ It’s pretty boring after a while,” Jason Lee ’06 said.

The biggest complaint about Thefacebook has been its redundancy. The SCCS-run Cygnet is already a handy directory that matches people’s faces to their names. Due to Swarthmore’s size, most Swatties are already familiar faces, and even the most intimate details posted on Thefacebook would not be difficult to retrieve through word of mouth, especially at such a tight-knit community as Swarthmore’s. Ultimately, Thefacebook is just another time-waster, as addictive and shallow as the similarly structured friendster.com. But due to its ease, its hip technological aspect, and its underlying sense of exclusivity, Thefacebook has for now become the hottest way to collect friends and keep track of potentially new ones.

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