By NANCY HASS The New York Times January 8, 2006
AS far as Kyle Stoneman is concerned, the campus police were the ones who started the Facebook wars. "We were just being, well, college students, and they used it against us," says Mr. Stoneman, a senior at George Washington University in Washington. He is convinced that the campus security force got wind of a party he and some buddies were planning last year by monitoring Facebook.com, the phenomenally popular college networking site. The officers waited till the shindig was in full swing, Mr. Stoneman grouses, then shut it down on discovering under-age drinking.
Mr. Stoneman and his friends decided to fight back. Their weapon of choice? Facebook, of course.
Once again they used the site, which is visited by more than 80 percent of the student body, to chat up a beer blast. But this time, when the campus police showed up, they found 40 students and a table of cake and cookies, all decorated with the word "beer." "We even set up a cake-pong table," a twist on the beer-pong drinking game, he says. "The look on the faces of the cops was priceless." As the coup de grace, he posted photographs of the party on Facebook, including a portrait of one nonplussed officer.
A university spokesman, Tracy Schario, insists that noise complaints, not nosing around Facebook, led the police to both parties. But, she says, "it's sort of an inevitability that if a party is talked about on the site, word of it will reach the enforcement people, who then have no choice but to investigate." In fact, two campus police officers and the chief's assistant are among the 14,000 Facebook members at George Washington.
The stunt could be read as a sign that Facebook has become more than a way for young people to stay in touch. Started in 2004 by Harvard students who wanted to animate the black-and-white thumbnail photos of freshman directories, the site is the ninth most visited on the Internet, according to Nielsen/Net Ratings, and is used by nearly five million college students. Facebook is available at most of the country's four-year colleges, and many two-year colleges, too.
Because of its popularity, though, the site has become a flashpoint for debates about free speech, privacy and whether the Internet should be a tool for surveillance. It has also raised concerns from parents, administrators and even students about online "addiction." "There are people on this campus who are totally obsessed with it, who check their profile 5, 6, 20 times a day," says Ingrid Gallagher, a sophomore at the University of Michigan. "But I think that more and more people are realizing that it also has a dark side."
Her estimates are not far off. Nearly three-quarters of Facebook users sign on at least once every 24 hours, and the average users sign on six times a day, says Chris Hughes, a spokesman for the site.
Using it is simple: students create online profiles, which they can stock with personal details like sexual preferences, favorite movies and phone contact numbers, with links to photo albums and diaries. The details listed are by no means reliable; it's common, under "personal relationships," to list a spouse as a joke (as does Mr. Stoneman). Like most networking sites, Facebook enables users to compile lists of friends whose names and photos are displayed, and to post public comments on other people's profiles.
One of the most attractive features to many students is that they can track down friends from high school at other colleges. Users can also join or form groups with names that run from the prosaic ("Campus Republicans") to the prurient ("We Need to Have Sex in Widener Before We Graduate") and the dadaesque ("I Am Fond of Biscuits and Scones"). Unlike general networking sites like Friendster and myspace.com, which let anyone join, Facebook and xuqa.com, which was started last year by a student at Williams, are confined to the insular world of the campus, which Internet experts say is the key to their success. Last fall, Facebook opened a parallel site for high school students. To sign up, a high school student has to be referred by a college student who is a Facebook user.
Facebook's charms are obvious even to administrators. "It's a fantastic tool for building community," says Anita Farrington-Brathwaite, assistant dean for freshmen at New York University. "In a school like ours that doesn't have an enclosed campus, it really gives people a way to find each other and connect." Harvard's president, Lawrence H. Summers, gave kudos to Facebook in the opening lines of his address to freshmen in September, saying he had been browsing the site to get to know everyone.
But concerns have flourished with Facebook's popularity. Despite safeguards placed on access -- only those with valid university e-mail addresses, ending in edu, can register as users, and students can bar specific people from viewing their profiles -- administrators and parents worry about cyberstalking.