High School Facebook

   By Chris Peterson 

       High School Facebook—which can be accessed at http://hs.facebook.com--now offers the service to students at most of the nation’s high schools. The website, while inaccessible to college students from their college accounts, is practically identical to the collegiate version.

       “Opening Facebook up to high school students was the logical next step for us,” said Chris Hughes, who, according to the Facebook website, occupies the office of “Press Guy.” “High schools and colleges, even though they’re very different in a lot of ways, are ultimately built on the same concept: an educational institution around which students assemble their everyday lives. Facebook has been really popular at colleges, so we believe the same thing could be possible at high schools.”

       Popular is, perhaps, an understatement. According to Alexa Internet—a subsidiary of Amazon.com that documents web traffic among customers—Facebook has a traffic ranking of 181. This ranking—which is based on the rough correlation between the number of visitors and the number of visits—is higher than Fox News, Travelocity, Wal-Mart, and LiveJournal.

       “We have about 170 servers [and] over 100 million hits per day,” said Hughes, who cited a Mediametrics report that ranks Facebook as one of the twenty most trafficked American sites on the Internet. “We received $12.2 million in April from Accel Partners. [We’ve] raised $12.7 million in venture funding…the money allows us to expand the company at a rapid pace.” According to Hughes, the company has more than quadrupled in size since more than 6,000 Harvard students signed up in a span of three weeks immediately after the Facebook began.

       Hughes—a college roommate of Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg who, like Zuckerberg and programmer Dustin Moskovitz, dropped out of Harvard to run Facebook in 2004—said that while the Facebook itself may be virtual, its goals are very much of this world.

       “In general, a guiding value of ours is making Facebook a resource for college kids that is directly tied to their everyday lives. So the decision to keep the [high school and college] networks separate sort of followed from that—high schoolers and college kids aren’t really interacting on a day-to-day basis, so their networks shouldn’t overlap.”

       The biggest difference between the two services is registration. For the college version, students must simply possess an email account from a member college. The high school version, however, requires that certain college underclassmen—in a system reminiscent of Google’s GMail—invite old friends who are still in high school. According to Hughes, this closed system is intended to make sure only legitimate high school students become members of Facebook.

       “[This way], we can authenticate emails and immediately assign them to a high school over the network,” said Hughes. “Of course the potential problem there is if college kids lie about their high school [on their Facebook account], but we think that happens extremely rarely. After that initial step, we then rely on high school students to only invite students at their own high schools. For the high schools [that do offer institutional email accounts], we’ve set up a system just like the college Facebook.”

       Even with this relatively closed system, the high school Facebook is still growing rapidly.

       “We have about 100,000 members, growing by about 8,000 a day,” said Hughes, who expects that the daily growth rate—about half of that seen by the collegiate Facebook—will snowball as more students join the high school Facebook. “It could potentially become larger than the college version.” This assertion—while perhaps not surprising—is impressive, considering that the collegiate Facebook already has a network of 1531 schools and over four million users.

       Yet the founders of the Facebook aren’t content with simply running the largest social network in college history. The “site development” department at Facebook—which Hughes describes as a place to brainstorm ideas for future permutations of the program—is constantly churning out new ideas. One product under development is Wirehog: an innovative “social” P2P service tied to the Facebook that, among other things, will allow Facebook users to access the shared directories of their friends. Of course, the Facebook’s eponymous flagship product won’t cease to evolve.

       “There are a lot of things in the works,” said Hughes. “New networks, improving the functionalities of colleges and high school, making sure the site works the way it does, improving this connection to ‘real’ life.” The idea factory in Palo Alto continues to churn, fueled, Hughes said, by youthful enthusiasm. “Our median age is in the mid 20s, and we’re running a serious operation,” said Hughes with a smile. “It makes for an interesting—and rewarding—environment.”