One of
the popular websites at school is the Facebook. It started off at the
beginning of 2004 as a relatively small site connecting various
colleges around the United States, but it soon expanded to
worldwide coverage. I first signed up about halfway through my
first year at university and found it to be an excellent way to
find other people in my classes or with shared interests.
When you first sign up, you can create a profile that describes
you, your hobbies, the music and movies that you enjoy, as well as
anything else you want to list. You can then input your classes by
department course number (e.g. POLI 347), and it will automatically
find the class and input the title of the class for you.
You can also input your address, phone number, website URL, and
AIM screen name. My only criticism of that is that there is no
place for those who use MSN or Yahoo, especially since far more
people up here in Canada have MSN than AIM.
Also on your profile is your "wall", which is like a message
board that allows others to post messages. These can be simple
"happy birthday" messages or anything else you want.
You can upload a photograph of yourself, as well as an unlimited
number of photo albums, which can then be viewed by anyone at your
school. You can even share them with people who do not have the
Facebook by clicking "share this album", which gives you a link
that can be sent to whoever you want to see you photos. You can
share either specific photo albums or all of the photos that you
have uploaded.
When you upload a photo, you have the ability to rotate it left
or right, and the best thing is that they are not reduced to a
small size and stay at a very nice viewing resolution.
They have a Java-based photo uploader, which has recently been
updated to work with the Mac. Unfortunately, it still seems to give
me errors when I try to upload photos in Firefox. Anticipating this
problem, they also include a "simple photo uploader" that works
just like attaching an email attachment in Gmail.
Searching is also very powerful. If you view your profile, you
can click on any one of the interests that you listed and find
other people who like the same thing. For instance, if I click on
the band Sonata Arctica, the search function comes up with 9 people
who "enjoy sonata arctica". I can then view their profiles, photos,
send a message, or add them to my friends list.
There's also one other option, and that's to "poke" someone.
When you poke someone, it just shows the other person that you've
poked them, and they can then poke you back or send you a
message.
You can also get extremely specific with your searching. For
example, you can search for men named John Smith from New York
majoring in Behavioural Sciences who like the band Anathema and are
looking for a friendship. Searching for people at other schools is
easy, too. You can do a search of all schools for a specific person
or just search one school. You can even find all the people that
graduated from high school in the same year as you.
When you search for people at other schools, you can't see their
profile until you add them as friends. Once you add someone as a
friend (regardless of school), you get updates when it comes close
to their birthday. Most people don't mind others adding them as
friends, though initially I tended to add only the people that I
actually knew.
You can also form groups, which let you communicate with others
that have the same interests. Some make legitimate sense (for
instance, Mac Users); others are a bit less serious (such as the
group for people who love to procrastinate). Note that the
procrastination group has 1238 members, whereas the Mac Users group
has 41.
The Facebook has been invaluable when it comes to finding people
who are in the same classes to share notes. Study groups can be
made up through the Facebook, and I've even used it to find people
to go to concerts with.
Most people that you contact are pretty nice and tend to be
generally friendly. I've even met a couple people off the site.
That said, I think a lot of people are a bit intimidated by the
Facebook and prefer to only use it to list those they know instead
of getting to know new people.
In my friend Lauren's words, "Facebook is a scary place, I think
I need to start slow...." 
Link: Facebook
