Free online facebook nears 160,000 users

College students are always looking for another means of procrastination. This spring, thefacebook.com proved a popular one, as hundreds of thousands of students planted themselves in front of their computer screens in search of old and new friends around the country.

Last year, Harvard junior Mark Zuckerberg and four friends collaborated to create an online facebook -- complete with user profiles and photographs -- which began at Harvard, but has since spread to students and colleges nationwide.

According to Harvard junior Chris Hughes, one of thefacebook's five founders, the aim of the site is two-fold.

The first of the site's missions is to serve "as a resource, a tool, a place where you can find information about people at your school," Hughes said. "The second part of it was just to have fun."

And with that mentality, thefacebook.com has evolved and grown into much more than a simple online directory. Now, 34 schools and 156,636 members are registered on the free service, and extra features such as summer plan information and birthday reminders have become standard elements. And there is still the mysterious "poking" option, a feature that the creators themselves still haven't defined in exact terms.

"It's just whatever the user wants it to be," Hughes said. "I think sometimes it's interpreted as a flirtation gesture .... It was just one of the random features that we decided to add to the site to give it some character."

Given that the Web site was, for creator Zuckerberg, one in a series of what Hughes termed "seemingly random computer projects," this attitude seems fitting.

And, accordingly, thefacebook.com refuses to take itself too seriously, despite the fact that it is growing in proportions that would make many small business owners see dollar signs everywhere.

"We'll never have users pay," Hughes said.

Despite their non-commercial mentality, though, the team of five has since expanded to eight.

"We were spending hours and hours a week, as if it were a parttime or a fulltime job," Hughes said.

And according to Hughes, the Web site is still aiming high, with the lofty goal of eventually signing on 100 schools -- "maybe more if we can" -- a figure that would nearly triple its current membership.

Still, the costs of running what has essentially grown into a full-fledged national media resource can be intimidating.

"It's thousands of dollars a month just to keep the computers up," said Hughes, who handles the business end of the organization. And the site gets so many hits daily that the team needs to keep purchasing additional computers simply to sustain it.

Yet despite these speedbumps, the site's wild popularity provides an incentive to keep going.

College senior Vinay Viralam, who currently has the most friends of any Penn student -- 488 at press time -- said he likes reconnecting with old friends on thefacebook.

"One girl I hadn't spoken to for eight years, and all of a sudden I got one of those facebook [friend] requests," he said. "Now, she's coming to New York later this summer and she's going to visit me."

Incoming freshman Anne Bruder discovered another benefit of the site.

"I've already met a bunch of people on it, especially all the freshmen," she said. "I've gotten a lot of e-mails saying, 'You're in Hill [College House]? I am too.'"

And the creators of thefacebook aren't slowing down anytime soon.

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