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The Facebook: A Great Way for Students to Connect

- 2005.12.16

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

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