Students USED To Use "Facebook" For Social Networking - NOW Its ASSBOOK!

[matcom]

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Facebook is so fall semester. Well, not really, but several upstarts are competing with the 800-pound gorilla of online college “social networking.”

Facebook, like Friendster and other networks not focused on college students, to create personal profiles and create huge social networks by viewing and corresponding with friends of friends online.

Most recent to enter the fray is The Assbook, created earlier this month as part of a scavenger hunt – the clue was the site’s URL – at the University of Chicago. When it comes to networking, the The Assbook gets intimate. This site takes the frightening step of connecting people not based on mutual friends, but on “whom they have hooked up with.”

Whereas Facebook has the polite “poke” function, in which a message is sent alerting a user to the poke (or expression of interest from another student), Assbook cuts straight to the “smack,” “pinch,” or “tap that ass.” Granted, these functions are all just like Facebook’s poke. “But people seem to really enjoy the ability to pinch someone’s ass, digitally,” said Yitzhak Wasileski, a Chicago student and Assbook entrepeneur. “So who am I to deny them that?”

With 1,400 users, the site has a long way to go to reach The Facebook’s 2.7 million, but, even without marketing it has already made a splash. “This is a labor of love in more ways than one,” Wasileski said. “I am not a business person, I’m an academic. That’s the difference, I think: people at Harvard would start something like this as a business, people at the U of C would start it as a social experiment.” And Assbook is not the only new student contender.

ConnectU is a site similar to Facebook. In fact, it’s so similar that the group of Harvard students that created ConnectU sued Mark Zuckerberg, the Harvard student who created Facebook, claiming he stole their idea. (He says the lawsuit is a waste of time and won’t talk about it.) Of course, neither of these should be confused with CollegeFacebook, which differs from each in that it has fewer features, perhaps a unique user or two, and the word “college” before “facebook.”

Among the novel parts of ConnectU are the forums it links to. From their profile, users can look at forum discussions, user blogs, and messages posted on StallScribbles.com, the interactive grimy bathroom wall. College students metaphorically scratch their cyber-blather into walls of the virtual stall. All confessions are anonymous, with only the college and a prison-like number listed, so students can feel free to revel in the therapy the digital commode has to offer. “I’m going back home for the first time since high school, and I hope the girls I wanted to score with back then see enough of a change to be interested in me this summer,” reads the most recent post, number 1058644038 from the University of Massachussettes at Amherst.

http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2005/05/20/network