I don't 'do' the online community thing, but when my immensely cooler younger brother urged me to check out Facebook, I reluctantly agreed to give it a shot.  As a recent graduate, I had heard of the popular social networking site for college students, and had friends from other schools who raved about it, but I'd never tried it.

Much like the chintzy notebooks handed out at new student orientations, Facebook, founded in 2004, offers a directory of people at your school.  But rather than just giving names and grainy (sometimes goofy) pictures, the site is a gateway where students from the same college can exchange messages, band together with those with shared interests, and post pictures. The site is similar to more general social networking sites like Friendster and MySpace, but focuses more on building close-knit friend networks.

It all starts when you create a profile, a veritable online autobiography with blurbs (all voluntary, of course) on your interests, favorite books, music and movies, relationship status, employment history, class schedule, and anything else you'd care to disclose.  Once that's established (and for many users, profiles are never finished – they're updated daily), it's time to make friends.
The process is a bit like election season canvassing. You send out scores of "friend requests," hoping that recipients will pull through for you on election day. When they agree to add you as a friend you know you've been successful. 

The friend accumulation starts with the obvious people: your roommate, hallmates, people from class, and your significant other.  From there it can go a number of directions. That cute girl or guy from Biology or French? Look him or her up. Want to keep in touch with your old friends from high school (or earlier)? Put their names through the "global search." More likely than not they've already got a profile. If you're running out of friends to add, search within your "social network" for friends of friends to discover new people.  Before you realize it, you've got a double-digit list of "friends" (and sometimes have spent double-digit hours surfing their profiles instead of researching that paper or studying for that test – or writing that blog about Facebook.) There are different views as to whether one actually needs to be offline friends to befriend someone on Facebook; both schools of thought have strong support.

Recently, Facebook added a feature found most prominently on the photo-sharing site Flickr. It allows you to "tag" people in photos you post with their name and a link to their Facebook profile, if they're registered.  This way, you can search for pictures of both yourself and your friends.  It's fun to see pictures from desk drawers and photo albums resurrected for all the world to see. Best of all, the whole service is free.

But picture-happy posters should watch their step, for their actions online are not as anonymous as they may assume. One of the big questions about Facebook is 'who gets to join?' Facebook registration is open to everyone at more than 2,500 supported colleges, universities (and now high schools) with a valid .edu e-mail address. That last part is important: anyone with a valid .edu email address can join up. That means professors, administrators, residence officials, and even alumni can join Facebook, browsing their organization's user pages with ease.  Suddenly those pictures of you at that party don't seem like such a great thing to be parading around.

The false sense of security created by the small, tightly networked community has led many students to openly advertise their extracurricular exploits (sometimes with pictures) in circles they wouldn't dream of offline (picture walking up to your college president and telling him about that really wild party the other night.)  A Boston-area student leader learned the hard way that what he said online wasn't as private or anonymous as he thought.  When he posted comments about a campus police officer to a Facebook group, the school's administration found out and he was expelled. That case and others like it – where students have faced disciplinary action based on information they posted - haven't had much effect on the community's popularity so far, but that could change as more Facebookers get wind that their profiles and pictures (when posted online) aren't just the property of their inner circle.

An interesting battle is brewing on two fronts in the effort to digitize the world of printed text as technology companies move to web-ify all books that existed before "bytes."

The Google Print Library Program, initially announced last year, is at the center of both a legal dispute with publishers and a competitive battle against a growing alliance of tech companies, search engines, and archivists.

The Google project aims to make "offline information searchable," with the goal of making every word in every book ever printed digitized, indexed, and available for searching online. That includes both public domain works and printed materials under copyright, although it would handle and display these two differently. Major publishers, upon seeing that their books were going to be digitized without their consent or oversight, raised a red flag and filed a lawsuit to stop Google from scanning and archiving copyright works.

Google argues that the way it handles the display of copyright material constitutes "fair use" because even though it will scan and index the text of such works, it will not display more than a few "snippets," allowing the user to then search for physical copies of the work at libraries or book stores. The publishers disagree with Google, saying such a project is done with the intent of increasing its search capabilities, and in turn increasing revenue, making its use of copyright material outside the realm of "fair use." Both sides have strong and interesting arguments in the case, and neither party looks likely to back down anytime soon.

At the other end of the spectrum, the Open Content Alliance (OCA) is taking a different approach — one that makes the scope of its efforts slightly less ambitious than Google's, but still a huge undertaking. The OCA will seek to digitize all public domain works, but only copyright material for which they gain explicit consent from the publisher. Made up of Google competitors Yahoo! and the Microsoft Network (MSN), which recently joined, the OCA's insistence on cooperating with publishers seems like both a slap at Google and a goodwill move that will make it easier to get publishers' consent.

The driving force behind the OCA is the Internet Archive, a nonprofit organization whose goal is to build an "Internet library" for the noble purposes of preserving history by "offering permanent access for researchers, historians, and scholars to historical collections that exist in digital format." Born in 1996, the Internet Archive now hosts around 25,000 digitized versions of printed material, as well as other media such as movies, audio clips, and software programs, all of which are either in the public domain or "open source." A visitor can get sucked in and lost for months in the Internet Archive (especially the Prelinger archives, which contains many amusing and disturbing propaganda films, instructional videos and commercials dating back to 1927).

So why have such commercial such as MSN and Yahoo! pledged so much money, technology, and equipment to a project spearheaded by a nonprofit, one whose moneymaking capabilities remain unclear?

One main goal of the OCA is to standardize the format of digitized works using the web-friendly XML standard to index text and PDFs for reproduction of book pages. As David Mandelbrot of Yahoo! recently told The Technology Review, "One of the things we've seen with other [digitization] programs is they tend to use proprietary technologies to host the content, so it's impossible for third-party search engines to crawl it."

Read "other [digitization] programs" as Google and "third-party search engines" as Yahoo and MSN, and it becomes clear why these companies have formed this alliance – to keep a monopoly of digitized print content out of Google's ever-expanding virtual hands.

As the OCA continues to gain members, it is disclosing the operational details, costs, and logistics of its digitization project, something that Google hasn't done. In effect, and somewhat ironically because of Microsoft's participation, the OCA has become a combination of an Open Source Alliance and the World Wide Web Consortium, while Google seems to be trying to become the Microsoft Windows of online content. Where it all ends up is anybody's guess, but the resolution of the lawsuits between publishers and Google will go a long way toward answering that question. In the meantime, we can soon look forward to full access to the myriad public domain works in the world, easily accessible and searchable with the click of a mouse.