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Thefacebook is a social networking website similar to sites like Friendster and orkut but specifically targeted at college and university students. The name is based on the paper facebooks that many colleges give to incoming students, faculty, and staff depicting members of the campus community. As of 2004, it has the largest number of registrants among college networking sites.
Features
The site is open not only to students, but to university faculty and staff as well.
Like other social networking websites, thefacebook.com allows users to search for people and select them as "friends," but it is targeted towards college students—indeed, the site attempts to restrict access to its various facebooks for different institutions by requiring a validated school e-mail address. The site limits the ability of students to access information between schools—though mutual friends from different schools may access each other's profiles—but Thefacebook offers an interesting advantage over other friendship websites in that it allows members to browse through students taking the same classes, living in the same buildings, or coming from the same high schools.
History
Thefacebook was founded in February 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg, then a sophomore at Harvard College.
Initially, the website only allowed Harvard University students to register. The website spread very quickly across the Harvard campus. Within a few weeks over half the undergraduate population had registered.
The website was then expanded, first to allow the registration of students from other Ivy League colleges and Stanford University. It became something of a network phenomenon, spreading very quickly, despite some opposition, including alleged Google bombing, at Columbia University from CUCommunity.com (http://www.cucommunity.com) [1] (http://www.columbiaspectator.com/vnews/display.v/ART/2004/09/08/413eb595b7657) [2] (http://www.columbiaspectator.com/vnews/display.v/ART/2004/03/22/405e8dca10e79?in_archive=1); the users of CUCommunity.com, later CampusNetwork.com, claimed that thefacebook was an imitation of their university's social networking community.
The website has since expanded to many universities across the United States and is, as of 2004, in terms of sheer numbers of registrants, the leading social network website aimed at college students. In November 2004, the number of registered users exceeded one million. Thefacebook hosts facebooks for some 375 different colleges and universities throughout the United States and Canada.
In October 2004, McGill University became the first Canadian institution featured on Thefacebook. A second Canadian university, the University of British Columbia, was added on November 13, 2004. On November 24, the University of Toronto was added, moving the number of Canadian schools represented to three. On February 1, 2005, the first British universities were added to the roster.
In 2004, the owners of the website ConnectU.com (http://www.connectu.com) filed a lawsuit against Thefacebook, alleging that Zuckerberg had stolen source code intended for ConnectU.com [3] (http://www.thecrimson.com/article.aspx?ref=503336) [4] (http://www.dailyprincetonian.com/archives/2004/09/20/news/10767.shtml).
Criticisms
Some have argued that Thefacebook is not as user-friendly as other college-networking websites. For example, Thefacebook has been criticized for not allowing users to view profiles of people at other colleges who have not already listed them as a friend. As well, it is not well-suited to blogging or journal-keeping in the way other, similar, sites are—its only blog-like feature is a "wall" on each user's page that any friend can edit, but with no organization.
External links
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