Facebook. Or "le livre de visage." Or maybe "das Angesichtbuch."
Once the social-networking toy of American collegians, Facebook has since expanded globally. And with membership recently growing at astronomical rates in Europe and other parts of the world, users say the site has started to bridge a gap of oceanic proportions.
Facebook opened up to continental Europe last year and has since begun to challenge MySpace and Skyrock Network as the dominant social-networking sites abroad, growing 422 percent in Europe from January 2007 to July 2007, according to Internet tracking site comScore.
The rapid increase in membership has been a boon for both students who are studying abroad and international students at Penn, many of whom say the site has made their transition easier.
College junior Mika Vale, who is currently studying abroad in England, said that as he has met new people, Facebook has proven extremely practical.
"It seems the use of Facebook here in the U.K. is identical as it is in the States," Vale wrote in an e-mail. "Personally, it has been really useful in getting to know people."
Facebook was introduced to the United Kingdom shortly after it became popular in America. It is one of the fastest-growing countries, with about five million users as of this August.
The site is similarly ubiquitous in Australia, to which it expanded in December 2005.
"I was very surprised that almost everyone over here uses Facebook every day just as much as in the U.S.," Engineering junior Nicolas Blanchet, studying abroad in Australia, wrote in an e-mail. "They use it for parties, events, etc."
In countries like Germany and France, the site is still lagging behind sites like MySpace, but membership numbers are still on the rise.
In those countries, users say Facebook is still primarily used as a means of keeping up with friends, and unlike users in the U.S., they tend to avoid using the site's bells and whistles like Facebook applications.
Sociologists and media experts differ on what effect the proliferation of Facebook will actually have.
Joseph Walther, professor of communication and telecommunication at Michigan State University, said it might actually add a more superficial aspect to international relationships.
Studies show that the quality of a person's photographs affect other peoples' perception of them, and Walther argued that Facebook might actually enforce stereotypes rather than increase tolerance.
Others, like Kathleen Carley, a computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon University, say that since Facebook users are of a younger and more open-minded generation, concerns about prejudice might be ill-founded.
In the end, says University of California, Riverside Sociology professor Robert Hanneman, Facebook's growth might not really matter.
"People tend to replicate the same kinds of social networks in cyberspace," he said. "Because they are going to network with the same people online than they do face-to-face, there is no evidence to say a diverse online network will have any effect at all."
