News Feed may not have sent birthday reminders or otherwise notified the site's 150 million users, but it's official - Facebook, one of the world's most widely used social networking sites, is five years old.
Brainchild of Harvard alumni Mark Zuckerberg and co-founders Dustin Moskovitz, Chris Hughes and Eduardo Saverin during their junior year, the Web site was created in 2004 with the purpose of connecting students on college campuses.
Since its launch, Facebook has expanded from social networking for Harvard and U.S. colleges to include high school, work networks, live and mobile chat and a platform for user-generated applications.
Its growth has made the site what researchers have called a social networking phenomenon, forever changing how friends, families and co-workers communicate with each other online.
As much is especially true for college students across the country - now across the world - who created accounts upon going away to college or who were already attending a university.
Melinda Messineo, a Ball State University sociology professor with an interest in social media research, said today's college students are among the first generation of youth to experience a life transition with and without the social networking site.
"The transition to college used to be an opportunity for young adults to drop their old identity and potentially adopt a new identity. [With Facebook] you can't get away from that identity that you had in the past," Messineo said.
Junior telecommunications major Hopeann Hintz created her account when she was a senior in high school and now has more than 1,000 Facebook friends. While she didn't check her account as frequently as she did when she first registered, like many of the site's young users, she's incorporated Facebook into her daily routine and stays on it for a total of about an hour a day, she said.
When the site became more popular and people started going to college she pulled out some old yearbooks and searched for old friends from elementary school in hopes of keeping in touch with them.
"They all accepted my friend requests. I reconnected with ... people I hadn't talked to in eight years. Now, that's the way we communicate," Hintz said.
Without the creation of a Facebook event, she said, planning a 10-year third grade class reunion last summer would have taken a lot longer, if it worked at all, and maintaining communication with her other long-distance friends would be more expensive.
Privacy from Parents and Professors?
While it may be easier to stay in contact with support networks to reduce homesickness and isolation, Messineo said a drawback to the site is the potential permanence of posted items and who has access to them.
More than half of Facebook's users aren't college students and its fastest growing demographic is 30 older, according to Facebook's press room Web site.
"It used to be so youth-oriented [in that you had to be in college to participate], so in that way it was more protective," Messineo said. People's feelings about posting safely online eased because of this membership."
She said Web spaces specific to a younger demographic may become more difficult to find as older generations - including parents, professors and employers - find themselves online.
"We see the same trend in video games and other digital and interactive technology," Messineo said. " ... It suggests there might not be as big a generation gap or cultural lag. But it may be frustrating for teenagers and those in college that this domain is now being taken over by older generations."
Junior music technology major Paul Marquissee has been a Facebook user since 2005. Just as he did with other changes to the site, he said he had mixed reactions when his mother created an account last year.
"When [Facebook] first started letting everyone onto it and when my mom first got Facebook it kind of freaked me out," he said. "It took away some of the specialness of it."
Marquissee said he hasn't changed his page's privacy settings since his mother joined his network. He understands her reasons for being on Facebook because she has friends and colleagues too, he said, but her comments on his status updates can be excessive.
"She just uses it to check up on me to make sure I'm OK," Marquissee said, "but her really random comments to my updates at 4 in the morning, like 'Why aren't you friends with Mozart today?' throw me off."
While Hintz's parents don't have Facebook accounts, she said she didn't see a problem with parents having their own pages. Those who have problems with letting anyone join are doing things they shouldn't be. She filters her page for younger relatives and potential employers who may be looking on her site, she said.
For some professors and teachers looking to reconnect with old friends through social networking sites like Facebook, accepting student friend requests and setting privacy controls can get tricky.
History professor Timothy Berg said he was completely uninterested with Facebook at first, but decided to give it a try in the fall after his wife, who is also a professor, started talking about and using it more frequently.
"I originally saw no need to have additional mediated communication with colleagues and people I see face-to-face every day," Berg said. "But my wife was having people find her from high school and making interesting connections with people she had long forgotten about."
He said he checks his account page every day and agrees it has been useful to help him re-establish past college relationships. He regularly sends e-mails to old friends since finding them on Facebook.
Berg said he wouldn't ever send friend requests to students, but always accepts their requests and doesn't go out of his way to check their pages.
"There's a special relationship between professor and student that needs to remain a certain way," Berg said. "For me to go out and be friending students is like reaching into their personal life that I don't have any business doing."
Messineo said she doesn't have a Facebook account, but has had a classmates.com profile for about five years. She uses it once every couple weeks to reconnect with members of her graduating class, she said.
"I'm always curious to see what students think about it," she said. "I wouldn't want to impose on their space, and I don't want it to seem inappropriate, but I like the idea of [Facebook] and it's use for networking."
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