While the thefacebook.com's popularity has been rising steadily since it was first introduced just a few months ago, a group of Princeton undergraduates have been developing a similar endeavor since early March.
Michael Li '07, Ben DeLoache '07, Cindy Lee '04 and Reona Kumagai '06 began to develop a campus-wide, digital facebook prior to the arrival of thefacebook.com. The service, called "ULink," has over 230 registered users and can be accessed by all students with a Princeton NetID and password, at ulink.cs.princeton.edu.
The four students thought of the idea towards the end of February. Beginning in January, Harvard students had been able to register with thefacebook.com, a creation of Harvard sophomore Mark Zuckerberg. The site, which allows members to find friends at other institutions, is now offered at 28 colleges and universities.
"We thought of the idea independently of [thefacebook.com], and started working on the programming well before we knew it even existed," Li said.
The idea originated from a group project for Professor Kernighan's course, COS 333: Advanced Programming Techniques. Students were assigned to construct a program consisting of both an Internet-based level and a database level.
From there, the group had originally planned on writing a program which would compute students' "Kevin Bacon" numbers — that is, a program which would calculate the number of personal associations necessary to "connect" any two students in the community.
"Our initial idea was to compute degrees of separation according to [academic] classes, but the registrar didn't like the idea of giving us the course lists," Li said. "So at that point we just decided it would be easier for students to log on manually."
Once this process of manual registration became the reality, the group designed the site so as to allow for special personalization features.
Students can post pictures of themselves, give written descriptions of academic interests and extracurricular activities and invite friends to join — features similar to those of thefacebook.com.
There are also, however, a couple of significant differences, the most notable of which is a "popularity" computation — the "popularity" of each user is calculated as a function of the number of online friends he or she has. The 10 most popular users are displayed prominently on the homepage.
Another distinguishing element is the Princeton-specific user information. Each participating member, when editing biographic and extracurricular descriptions, can choose from preexisting options which include all the various fraternities, sororities, sports teams and eating clubs here at the University.
"I actually think it's better than thefacebook.com. There are more campus-specific preferences and the whole popularity thing is really fun," said Jeffrey Wayno '07, currently ranked as the fifth-most popular ULink user, said.
Though the site already boasts over 230 users, disappointment with their "late arrival" was voiced by some members of the group.
"Initially, I was really disappointed. We even called Zuckerberg and asked him if he would hold off from introducing [thefacebook.com] at Princeton until the end of the semester," co-founder DeLoache said.
Though Zuckerberg agreed, DeLoache said, thefacebook.com officially opened to University students just a few days later.
"I don't know why he changed his mind," he said. "Maybe it has to do with the lucrative potential of the site."
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