During her sophomore year, 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 junior. “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 February 2004, 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.

The site now has more than 1.1 million registered users, with more than 6,000 at KU.

Matt Wadsworth, KU sophomore, became one of those students when he registered last fall 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 a while 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.”

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.

“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.”

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,” fans of “Kansas Basketball” and everyone who loves to quote “Napoleon Dynamite.”