The command options on Thefacebook.com are familiar enough to the average Princeton student. View profile. Send message. Add to friends.
Columbia University juniors Adam Goldberg and Wayne Ting now want to add new terms — page notes, instructor evaluations and hot journals — to the online Princeton vocabulary.
Goldberg and Ting are founders of CampusNetwork, a student-run online community which becomes available to Princeton students today.
Their intention is not for the site to be a substitute for Thefacebook.com. Rather, CampusNetwork's predecessor sites, SEASCommunity.com and CUCommunity.com, were the original online college communities.
"SEASCommunity was launched eight months before Thefacebook, so it's definitely not a copycat site," Ting said.
Thefacebook.com is primarily a networking site, allowing students to accumulate lists of friends and look at pictures of friends of friends.
Ting believes Thefacebook and CampusNetworks are two distinct online community concepts.
"I think Thefacebook's great and I use it in addition to CampusNetwork," Ting said.
CampusNetwork has many features which reach beyond other online college communities.
The site allows members to create weblogs, photo albums and sophisticated profiles. It also features professor evaluations and 10 radio stations.
Site features
The site was built in a way intended to encourage discussion and controversy.
"We want it to be useful in students' everyday lives, allowing for the meeting of minds and the sharing of political views," Ting said.
The site's weblog feature allows members at all schools on the site to comment on journal entries about issues such as the Columbia-Barnard rivalry and the presidential election.
Unlike Thefacebook's closed format where students must be members to access more than just the site's FAQ and About pages, profiles and most other pages on the CampusNetwork site are open to members and nonmembers alike.
The CampusNetwork staff has never wanted to feed into the "more users is better" mentality which seems to exist not only at Thefacebook.com, but also at ConnectU.com and Friendster.com, among other sites, Ting said.
Though there is minimal programming involved in opening the site to users with new email address domains, Ting said the staff had difficulties expanding the site beyond Columbia because of a desire to maintain a vital site community, he said.
Student reaction
Casey Degen '05 thinks that CampusNetwork "sounds like it would be fun," but "feels like Thefacebook.com already has a monopoly on online [communities]" for college students.
Some students speculated that the added features might draw other University students to sign up. Kelsey Johnson '08, for one, said she would be interested in joining the site.
"I guess I'd join, but I don't really know if I would," Johnson said. "Professor reviews would definitely be cool."
Ting and his team hope that Johnson's openmindedness is indicative of the Princeton student body in general.
Ting said he is primarily depending on word of mouth to popularize CampusNetwork at Princeton.
He said he will be disappointed if the site is not successful at Princeton but added that he and Goldberg are "ultimately two Columbia students who wanted to do something good for our school community."
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