For college kids, Facebook is totally addictive

There is much to discover on the Facebook -- the online community for college students similar to networking sites like Friendster, MySpace and Tribe.net -- such as which cute guy already has a girlfriend. This state of online exploration might be called the Facebook Trance, and it can last for hours.

"You stare into it FOR-EV-ER," says Melissa Doman, a George Washington University sophomore, turning away from her laptop for a moment. There is great social wisdom to be gleaned from the Facebook, which went online at a small group of schools last winter and now is used by about a million students at nearly 300 colleges.

You can wander through profiles of people you wish you knew, imagining what they must be like. You can compare the number of "friends" you have listed in your profile to the number of "friends" your roommate has.

The Facebook, the invention of a group of Harvard students, provides everything today's savvy college kid needs. It maps out the cool kids and the purposeful freaks, the most popular music and the least -- important for those who value obscurity. It's like an ever-changing yearbook.

The Facebook allows anyone to fake the appropriate level of college nonchalance. If you meet someone in class and can't remember his name, you can look him up on the class lists. You can establish yourself in the clique structure by listing your interests and the Facebook "groups" you belong to, which anyone can create. They include names such as "Cancer Corner," for students who smoke, and "I Want to Be a Trophy Wife and You Can't Stop Me!" Each school that belongs to the Facebook has a different private network, inaccessible to outsiders, and on GW's network, there is a lively debate over the acceptability of turning one's shirt collar up.

"It really does help you kinda get to know people," says Anne Oblinger, a freshman who created the "Ann Coulter Fan Club" and also belongs to "Collars Up!," "Republican Princesses" and "Preppy Since Conception."

Getting to know people can be a particularly useful tool during the first few weeks of freshman year.

"You would meet someone and you would just run upstairs and go online and type in their name," says Oblinger's sorority sister, freshman Ali Scotti .

Many students tell stories of waking up after a night of partying to find new "friend" requests from people they met in passing the night before, whose names they can barely remember. It isn't unheard of to get a friend request from a perfect stranger. Sending a friend request is also known as "facebooking," and it offers the facebookee the choice of accepting or rejecting the request. People seldom reject friend requests, however -- it's considered rude.

The trust that GW students place in the Facebook -- full names and e- mail addresses are in their profiles, and many list instant-message screen names and cell phone numbers -- is possible because their online community is closed to outsiders. It's free but you must have a school e-mail address to register, and when you do, you get access only to the profiles of others in your school.

The Facebook has a way of taking over a school's culture. Students talk about checking their accounts four or five times a day, not only to research people but also to read private messages and to read comments others have scrawled on their virtual "walls."