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"What is this Facebook stuff?" the senior asked. "Everyone keeps asking me, 'Are you on Facebook?'"
And she has to be. Everyone at GW is on thefacebook.com, an online friends network that connects students from several universities through friends, classes and interests. Well, not everyone, yet. But since GW logged on August 21, more than 2,500 students have signed up and are searching their social connections and classmates for familiar faces.
Signing up for Facebook is simple, since for most students its link has probably been forwarded to them by people looking to "friend" them. But before creating an account, students must go to www.thefacebook.com and register.
It will prompt students through a series of steps to fill out a profile consisting of questions that get relatively personal, such as AOL Instant Messenger screen name, e-mail address, phone number and residence on campus. But users don't have to fill out any more details than they are comfortable with.
"This is a good way to put names to some of those faces I recognize from the past three years," Keith Raine said. And from a quick read of his Facebook profile, you can find out that Raine is a senior from Massachusetts in the Tau Kappa Epsilon fraternity whose favorite books include "The Great Gatsby" and Hemingway classics.
Once on the network, a student can enter their GW course schedule, which then establishes his or her initial list of "connections." The Facebook will scan its registered GW users and list people in the same class. Students can then look at their picture, find out their e-mail address, read their profile to learn about them - major, hometown, favorite quotes, movies, books, etc. - and allows the user to contact their connections through "poking" or messaging. Searches can even be conducted to find people with similar interests or backgrounds.
According to the Frequently Asked Questions page, the site is a network of colleges that connects people through courses and friends and aims to expand to more schools this year. Juniors Adam Conner and Bert Garcia helped it expand to GW.
"I worked with two kids from Tufts (University) and (The University of Pennsylvania) that were on it all the time, and I got interested," Conner said. Conner and Garcia then set up a Web site with information on the Facebook and sent out a hundred e-mails with a link to it. The e-mail got forwarded throughout the student body and the word spread.
