Mark Hendrikson suggests that students want facebook back. As others have noted, the opening up of Facebook to those that don’t have an educational email address has lead to a massive growth in usage. I’m not sure what Zuckerberg had intended originally for Facebook users once they’d graduated. Would a now defunct email address be allowed? Would they have been able to change the address once they were members? It’s rather a moot point now, as an academic email address is no longer required.
Facebook is, however, becoming mainstream, lecturers (e.g. me!) have a presence in there.
So, Hendrikson suggests a set of different sites that students might want to join.
When Facebook first opened up to users outside of the US, and an ac.uk email address could gain entry, I joined. At the time, I was restricted to just joining a Portsmouth group. At the time there were very few Portsmouth members. I certainly didn’t know anyone else on the list. I just wish I’d kept screenshots at the time, rather than thinking “this won’t work – the students who want this sort of thing will just use MySpace.
Had I but known!
So, perhaps I should join one of the sites listed, and see what happens. Or perhaps I should just wait, and see what happens.

On a related note, a colleague mentioned that she was asked by a student about Facebook. He’s planning an article in Pugwash – it will be interesting to read it once he’s written it.

Refs:

Hendrikson, M, (2007, November 3) The Old College Try: Who will give Facebook back Techcrunch. Retrieved November 10, 2007 from http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/11/03/the-old-college-try-who-will-give-students-their-facebook-back/