This past weekend Gustavus Adolphus College was added to the list of schools on http://thefacebook.com. Since then I have noticed some interesting facts. A site like Thefacebook is very disruptive. As far as I can tell, it is the hottest website on campus right now. People in the computer labs, student workers computers, and just about every other computer on campus appears to be visiting that site on a regular basis.
I first heard about it this past weekend. Just after the word got out and spread like crazy. There was such a rush that hundreds of people were registering on their site in a matter of hours. How do I know? It turns out that every time you register / invite a friend, it sends that person an email. Well our email server saw such a large influx of email from their site that we temporarily marked them as high volume spammers. Once we figured out what was happening we white listed them though.
Since this weekend, the number 1 site visited from users here on campus has been their site. At the moment 10% or more of our HTTP traffic is going just to this one site. That equates to numers that can be measured in megabits per second. Its just crazy.
Anyway, I guess it is something an anti-social person like me will just never fully understand.
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