Some 27,000 members and counting. Photograph: Gary Wayne Gilbert

Facebook came to Boston College in April 2004, about a year and a half after I arrived as an undergraduate and just three months after its birth at Harvard. Boston College was in roughly the third wave of the site’s expansion, following its appearance at Columbia, Stanford, and Yale, and I was one of the initial 80,000 or so college students to sign up. That may seem like a large group, but consider this: On January 7, 2009, less than a month shy of its fifth birthday, Facebook welcomed its 150 millionth member (the site opened to high school students in 2005 and to the general public in 2006). Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s founder, said at the time, “If Facebook were a country, it would be the eighth most populated in the world, just ahead of Japan, Russia and Nigeria.” Three months later, on April 8, the number topped 200 million.

For the uninitiated—a population that’s being reduced at a rate of almost a million a day—Facebook is a social network that allows users to create personal profiles, limited in scope only by their time and imagination, and connect and communicate with other members (people they have “friended.”)

At Boston College the site was immediately popular: Within a week of its campus debut, a Heights article reported that 2,500 people with bc.edu e-mail addresses—mostly students—had signed up and created profiles. That number has increased to more than 27,000 today, and it includes students, alumni, faculty, and staff.

Among Facebook’s many utilities is a “groups” feature that allows users to join collections of other Facebook members in associations based on common interests. In the Boston College network—a list comprising Facebook users registered under BC e-mail addresses—there are more than 4,400 groups, with affinities (official and otherwise), that include class years, sports, politics, music, religion, the full range of the University’s academic offerings, and a vast miscellany of random pursuits. In most cases membership demands little more than signing up. Joseph DeCarle ’09, president of the BC Entrepreneur Society, administers his organization’s Facebook group. The page “isn’t too active on the user end,” he says—most members tend not to add content—“but it serves as an excellent tool for reaching members of the BC community with information on events that we are hosting.” Whenever the club presents a speaker, DeCarle creates an informational “event page”; he then broadcasts it to the 235 members of the Entrepreneur Society Facebook group. An RSVP function gives him a rough forecast of attendance. (Recently, a talk by Harpoon Brewery cofounder Richard Doyle elicited 91 confirmed guests and an additional 56 who thought they might attend.) “We’ve increased programming attendance from a 20-person average last school year to over 100 this year,” says DeCarle, crediting Facebook.

The Facebook page of BC Relay for Life promoted its American Cancer Society fundraiser (a 12-hour team walk around an indoor track) and extended an invitation to a “Party for a Purpose” fundraiser at a Kenmore Square bar. BC Students for Sexual Health, a group with 1,826 members, offers a 600-word manifesto on its page—among other things, it calls for on-campus distribution of birth control devices—plus a video showing a 25-foot “vote ‘yes’ for health” banner being unfurled down the front of the Commonwealth Avenue garage.

Facebook may have started as a utility for students, but universities themselves are increasingly attracted to the site. At Boston College, the Career Center, the Church in the 21st Century Center, and Chronicle, the biweekly newspaper for faculty and staff, all have a Facebook presence. University advancement has established two sites: the Maroon & GOLD page (aimed at recent graduates) and the Neenan Challenge, a fundraising effort named for popular University administrator William Neenan, SJ, who himself has a Facebook profile that he updates regularly. (Recently revealed: Black jellybeans are his favorite.) The Neenan Challenge page features videos of alumni such as Ken Hackett ’68, president of Catholic Relief Services, and Liz McCartney ’94, founder of the St. Bernard Project in New Orleans and CNN’s 2008 Hero of the Year.

There is a Boston College Facebook page, sporting the University seal, that has been moribund since the day it was created, presumably by an alumnus. It has 5,285 members (and counting) who seem not to care they’ve entered a still spot. Boston College itself has at present no designs on establishing an official Facebook page for the University, according to Boston College Magazine editor Ben Birnbaum, who also directs the Marketing and Communications office for the University. “When you own a website with 54,000 pages and more than 800,000 unique visitors a month, and have e-mail access to more than 100,000 alumni, students, employees, and parents, the cost of supporting a Facebook page is hard to justify,” Birnbaum observes.

Among Facebook devotees, the ease of forming Facebook groups has led, not surprisingly, to some less-than-serious assemblies. “I Drink Pop, Not Soda,” for instance, is for “all you people who know the proper name for a certain type of beverage;” it has 172 (I’m guessing native Midwestern) Boston College members. A quick tour through the Boston College network turns up “Beer Is Good” (only 233 members), “Stephen Colbert for Commencement Speaker 2010″ (listed, curiously, in the “Religion and Spirituality” category), and the “Skunk Hunting Association of Boston College,” whose two members are dedicated to tracking down a skunk that, apparently, haunts Lower Campus. I’m not a candidate to join “My Favorite Animal Is the Loon,” a BC group “dedicated to the best animal on the planet because not only is it the Minnesota state bird, but it can fly, swim, and catch fish like a fish” (six members). But I’ve got my eye on “I’m Not Gonna Lie, I Feel Like This Wicked Long Scarf Is Taking Over My Life.” It has four members and is based “somewhere on Cushing 3.”

Postscript: Since the publication of the Spring issue of Boston College Magazine, the University has launched the official Boston College Facebook page. It includes photo albums, directions to campus, and frequent updates about BC alumni, students, and faculty. The page currently has more than 5,600 fans, and can be viewed here.

Read more by Tim Czerwienski