What are you looking for? A study partner? A date? A new friend? An old friend? Everyone is looking for someone. However, Ball State students are not doing it the same way they used to. On Nov. 18, thefacebook.com, an online college directory, opened its resources to Ball State.
It's simple to get started on thefacebook.com. It takes only minutes for students to sign up for the free service, fill out a profile with as much or as little personal information as they want and add a picture. Soon invitations begin arriving from other students who want to be friends. As a security measure the user has to approve the invitations before anyone is added to their friend list.
Students can also search for people to invite to join their list. A Ball State search allows students to find classmates, residents of dorms or in specific areas of study. A global search widens the possibilities by searching other schools as well as Ball State for students from a certain town, high school, state or college. There is also a name search available when looking for specific people.
"It's really easy and fun to use. You can meet people who have the same interests and styles. I don't think it's a bad thing to get caught up in, unless you are on it 24 hours a day. That's just unhealthy," freshman architect major Dominic Angotti said.
Although it is simple to get started on thefacebook.com, it can be hard to stop. While many students check it only once or twice a day, some spend hours searching for new friends, updating their profiles or in poking "wars" where they see how many times they can poke their friends. It is easy for time to disappear just searching for new groups to be involved in, as there are more than 1,000 available, with more being added every day.
Thefacebook.com was not originally intended as a large production. Five Harvard students dreamed it up one night as a small, interschool directory where classmates could contact each other. Today, slightly less than 300 schools are on thefacebook.com. Students attending schools that are not currently on the list may request for their school to be added.
Only 10 days after Ball State was added, more than 4,500 students had signed up and were making connections. Similar responses have occurred at other schools when they began thefacebook.com. Not surprisingly, this has attracted the attention of several companies, such as AOL and the Student Advantage Card, who now advertise on the site.
Not everyone is a big fan of the website though.
"I think it's just another way for people to not really talk to each other, but to pretend they talk to each other," junior general studies major Jennifer Sims said. "Those aren't really friendships. People just use the computer to screen themselves from things."
Whether or not thefacebook.com is a good idea does not appear to matter to the Ball State students who are joining up. What does matter is that it is a Web site focused on bringing them closer to people with similar interests or classes. And, of course, it is a good way to procrastinate.
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