You can establish yourself in the clique structure by listing your interests ("guns," "making out," "pink shoes") and the Facebook "groups" you belong to, which anyone can create. They include names such as "Cancer Corner," for students who love to 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 polo shirt collar up. Almost a thousand students have demonstrated their brave nonconformism by joining anti-popped-collar groups, while a small segment aligns itself with the preppy ethos through a group called "Collars 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 -- without their knowledge, of course -- 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 and fellow freshman Ali Scotti (interests: "shopping, Bill Clinton, wearing pearls"). "People call it the 'stalker book,' " she says.
The Facebook's friends section is, for some people, the most important of all. It lists the number of friends a person has at his or her own school and at other colleges that also belong to the Facebook. The Student Association president has 747 friends at GW alone. Some people watch the growth of their friend counts carefully.
"I'm not competitive," says Scotti, who has 157 friends at GW and more at other schools. "Well, okay, that's a lie. A little bit competitive."
It is not necessarily cool to admit this, especially since, as everyone who's used the Facebook knows, a high friend count is as much evidence of a willingness to hustle as it is proof of popularity.
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 is not 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, and besides, everyone wants a high number.
Melissa Doman (interests: "cuddling, shots") has 156 friends at GW, though "if you go to 'all schools,' " she points out, "I have 244, and I'm damn proud of that." She tells the story of how she once rode an elevator with a fellow student; she introduced herself and they spoke "like 20 words." When she next logged on to the Web site, she discovered he'd looked her up by her first name and "facebooked" her.
She scrolls to his picture now, on the laptop in her dorm room.
