A few weeks ago, Alexis Anderson finally buckled under the peer pressure. Like thousands of other Kansas University students, she gave in to her friends and registered at thefacebook.com.

“I went to visit my best friend at Dartmouth,” says Anderson, a Kansas University sophomore. “We were walking on campus, and people recognized me from being on thefacebook. It’s funny how widespread it is. Everyone is doing it.”

Years ago, new college students received a slim volume filled with the smiling graduation pictures and names of their fellow freshmen. As of last February, college kids can get all the information they want in the format they know best. Thefacebook.com took an old idea and gave it a digital makeover.

Mark Zuckerberg, a student at Harvard, had an idea last winter to combine a universal online database with an interactive social networking interface.

“The idea was sort of an extension of the traditional college facebooks with terrible freshman ID photos and boring information,” says Chris Hughes, co-founder of the site. “After a few weeks of work and many late-night dorm-room conversations with the rest of us — the four other guys who started out working with Mark — thefacebook was released at Harvard.”

And it continued to grow, creeping by word-of-mouth down the East Coast and across the country. The site now has more than 1.1 million registered users, with more than 6,000 at KU.

Matt Wadsworth, KU freshman, became one of those students when he registered last week after his roommate showed him the site. The first thing he did was look up some high school pals.

“Right away, there was probably about five people I wanted to get in contact with,” Wadsworth says. “It’s cool just because of the fact that you don’t see your friends from high school for awhile and you can see where they’re at and what they’re majoring in. It might eventually die down, but right now it’s pretty big.”

High profile

Students can sign up from their campus e-mail address — only .edu addresses are accepted — and view profiles of everyone who signs up at their school, with thumbnail links to students at other networked colleges.

“We wanted students to have control over what information they would like to provide to their peers: screen names, favorite movies, classes and friends,” Hughes says. “Thefacebook is a Web site that is both a resource for information and communication and a means for recreation.”

Students looking to procrastinate from studying or just pass the time between classes can view each other’s profiles and photos, which can be updated whenever the itch comes. They can compare favorite movies and books, course schedules, relationship status, political leanings and, perhaps most important, lists of other people’s friends.

“You get on and you don’t realize how much time you’re spending,” Anderson says. “It seems so ‘junior high,’ but I love it. There’s nothing like getting an e-mail that says so-and-so wants to be my friend. It makes campus feel quite small.”

Thefacebook.com

In the spirit of social climbing, students can invite people they know, or want to know, to be on their official friends list with no guarantee they’ll accept. The site sends the invitee an e-mail with a link to confirm they are truly friends.

To move beyond your own social circle and find people with similar interests, students can browse detailed profiles of people who think “The West Wing Rocks My World” (22 members), fans of “Kansas Basketball” (588) and everyone who loves to quote “Napoleon Dynamite” (216). They can send a message to the people who cited “The Da Vinci Code” as a favorite book (330) or poke fun at someone who listed Ryan Adams as a favorite musician (71).

Not just a fad

To keep up with the ever-changing Web environment, thefacebook soon will expand to include more schools and, eventually, a file-sharing program for users. The site will be partnering with another project called wirehog, already available for students at Stanford and Harvard, to let users share music files and pictures.

“I think, in general, people are cognizant of the fact that Web sites come and go,” Hughes says. “I think thefacebook, instead of being a fad, will continue to evolve and adapt to what is happening in the lives of our users and what’s happening online.”