A group of Harvard students has fashioned a social network site for
stimulating connectedness among coeds at several top-flight schools.  According
to their site, 

You can use Thefacebook to:
– Search for people at your school
– Find out who is in your classes
– Look up your friends’ friends
– See a visualization of your social network 

This has interesting possibilities, especially for its emphasis on
institutionally centered networks as safe(r), inherently associational, loaded
with potential for fruitful connections. The visualization feature is
intriguing, too.  And although it’s pitching the social dimension of
undergraduate life (where there are, of course, other ways to "find out who
is in your classes"), I can’t help but wonder how Thefacebook could affect
professional networks or whole fields of study, perhaps even the entire
professorate (provided there is such a thing). For now, the group is playing on
the kid-ish "poke" to name the contact gestures.  Pokes are kind of like trackback pings–only they’re aimed at interpersonal,
single-channel (removed from wide readability) communications; I suppose this
brand of funning toward a sense of social connection and generated collegiality
would doom Thefacebook to imminent failure in more formal (read serious, read
professional) circles.  But it’s fun to think about the potential, even
to imagine how this might reweave the social fabric for community colleges or
commuter-based institutions or large-scale distance learning programs (none of
which appear on the list yet).  So far, according to the
article on Wired News, nearly 250,000 students are registered for poking at
34 institutions.  Notably, the site limits poking to folks at one’s
own institution, which makes good sense considering that students at Harvard
really shouldn’t be poking students at UMich–and vice versa.