Why?

Without being a member of the Millenial Generation — ages 18-24 — something such as Facebook may be difficult to understand. Certainly, there’s nothing new or unique about human interaction and the desire to meet new people and mingle with the opposite sex and occasionally partake of an alcoholic beverage. But the degree to which students are loyal to Facebook borders on the odd.

“Every time I go to do homework,” says Corie Korin, a freshman from Princeton. “I go, ‘I wonder if anyone has e-mailed me’ (through Facebook), even though I know nobody has.”

Adds Puckett, “That’s the bad part of Facebook. Sometimes you don’t really get your school work done.”

For Amy Wodicka, a 4.0 freshman from White Bear Lake, Facebook is about meeting new people and keeping in touch with old.

“You can go through and it’s interesting to see how people you used to know have changed,” she said.

Hughes says that unlike on MySpace, Facebook users’ profiles are available to a few thousand people who already share in that person’s “real-world” community. Because users must have a college e-mail address, he says, no one is ever anonymous. Each page can be traced back to a real person, and that creates accountability.

“Users can choose exactly who they want to see their profile, whether it just be their friends, friends of friends, only students or various other combination of users,” Hughes said. “At the end of the day we’re interested in giving as much control to our users as possible.”

Other uses

The list of who else uses Facebook is a growing one.

• Last fall, North Carolina State University disciplined several students for underage drinking after a resident assistant found party photos of them on Facebook.

• A few days after students rushed the football field following a Penn State win over Ohio State, campus police found pictures of the incident containing identifiable students on Facebook.

• Northern Kentucky and the University of Kentucky both have disciplined students they’d seen drinking in pictures posted on Facebook.

•Ca;mpus police at George Washington University use Facebook to find underage drinkers.

• Employers and the career center at the University of Kansas use Facebook to evaluate students being considered for KU jobs.