October 7, 2005

Are you facebooking?

by Maria Ignatova

Photo from facebook.com

On college campuses across the country, a Web site called “The Facebook” has become an obsession. It's an electronic version of traditional college facebooks, which generally included pictures and hometowns of incoming freshmen. Now, anyone with a college or university e-mail address can log on and check out profiles of students from thousands of colleges in the United States.

Three Harvard students created facebook.com. Starting off as an on-campus network the Web site became public in February 2004. Since then it has hooked more than 4.5 million students on over 2,000 college campuses. Washington and Lee is one of those schools whose students cannot live a day without logging on to the Web site. Statistics show that around 90 percent of all the students have profiles there.

W&L students and facebook.com

Source: Washington and Lee Registrar and facebook.com

When visiting facebook.com students can look at profiles of other people from their school and “ask” them to be Facebook friends. Also they can connect with their friends from back home, send messages, leave notes on one another’s walls and get birthday notifications. Still not clear what the Facebook is? Take a look at the Rockbridge Report video or ask any college kid!

Watch: What is  facebook.com?

Links: facebook.com

Produced by Washington and Lee journalism students.

Lead supervisor:      Prof. Claudette Artwick

Reporting supervisor: Prof. Doug Cumming

Editing supervisor:  Prof. Pamela Luecke

Technical supervisor:  Michael Todd