For months, Cieran Rockwell had fended off the joking entreaties of fellow students to join them in an Internet craze sweeping college campuses nationwide. He was afraid, he said, that Thefacebook.com would take over his life.
But over the recent winter break, the Pomona College senior finally succumbed to the lure of the social networking website.
"I felt like I resisted long enough," said Rockwell, 21, Pomona's student body president.
The frenzy is consuming more than a few others too.
Launched by five undergraduates at Harvard University in February, the free website, www.thefacebook.com, has 1.5 million members, nearly all of them students, from more than 300 colleges and universities nationwide. More than half the users have signed up in the last two months, a spokesman said.
Students post photos and information about themselves, including political views, tastes in music and movies, and their relationship status. They connect to members at their own schools or, in a more limited way, at others. They check out date prospects, join serious and silly interest groups, search for old friends and make new ones.
The website's growing database intrigues sociologists, economists and other researchers, even as it raises privacy concerns among some college officials. Advertisers are eager to reach its lucrative young market. And a rival website has already filed suit.
Yet Thefacebook.com is also a rare, relatively unguarded window into how young people relate to one another and present themselves.
Constantly updated, it has become an online reflection of the personal evolutions that college often entails.
"It's a way for students to calibrate what they have and who they are with other people out there," said James E. Katz, a Rutgers University communications professor who studies the Internet's effects on social relationships.
"It gives them a way to try out different personalities and see which ones resonate, and that is part of what going to college is all about," he added.
Clever, goofy or profane, the website has a powerful hold on its members, most of whom log on to it almost every day, the founders say.
Nine out of 10 do so at least once a week.
"I feel like I'm admitting an addiction," joked Kyle Warneck, 21, a Pomona College senior who says he has tried lately to cut his "facebooking" time from an hour or so to 10 minutes a day. "I just obsessively play with it."
