By Nick Casey

A partial view of Melissa Fusco’s Facebook page shows her personal profile and comments from friends.

Wendy Hagenmaier grew up in Los Altos and studies English and film at Stanford University. She likes writing, fireworks and tomato soup in bread bowls. Among her musical favorites are Fiona Apple and Beethoven. The movie “Amelie” is on her best movie list, which may not be surprising since a photo of Hagenmaier shows that she bears more than a passing resemblance to the film’s lead actress.

What is surprising is that one doesn’t need to meet Hagenmaier to learn any of these details about her. One only needs to be logged on to Facebook, the college community’s largest online networking service.

“Some of my friends are obsessed with it,” Hagenmaier said. “They always have their computer window up. It’s almost to stalker-ish extent.”

The Facebook Web site offers members Web space to assemble a brief profile of their tastes, post personal photos and create a list of “friends” whom they’ve met in real life and are now linked to in the online community. Membership is free, requiring no more than a college e-mail account and time to upload a profile.

There has been a flood of similar online social networking systems launched in the last four years: LiveJournal, Friendster, MySpace, MyYearbook and LinkedIn. All offer networking services overlapping those of Facebook.

Yet Facebook’s online popularity has exceeded that of its competitors. In the way that Google proved all search engines are not the same, Facebook lures participants with its array of interpersonal connections.

For instance, if a person has listed “Lolita” as his or her favorite book, a click on the title calls up a list of like-minded fans at Stanford. This is true of almost every category on a person’s Facebook page - from residence to birthday to interests.

Facebook also compares the site viewer’s list of friends with the site subject’s friends and produces a list of people the two know in common - a useful entrée for someone interested in getting to know the site owner. There is messaging capability and a “poke” function. When you’ve been poked, a flash message appears saying who the poker is. It’s like saying hello without commitment.

Facebook was launched in 2004 by Harvard undergrad Mark Zuckerberg, who spent that year’s spring break creating an online version of his college’s own Facebook. Zuckerberg sent a pilot version of the program to his dormitory’s mailing list of approximately 300 people. Within 24 hours, the site had more than 1,200 users.

From then on, the program’s growth has been viral. In three weeks, Zuckerberg had replicated the site and launched it at Columbia, Yale and Stanford; four months later, it had expanded to 40 schools and had 150,000 registered users.

Zuckerberg left Harvard for Palo Alto to work on his site full time with a small paid staff. By May 2005, Facebook had raised more than $12.7 million in venture capital from Accel Partners of Palo Alto. In March 2006, Business Week reported speculation that Zuckerberg had declined an acquisition offer of $750 million for his company, demanding $2 billion instead.

Today, Facebook claims more than 7 million registered college students. Approximately 20,000 new accounts are being created every day.

In a recent interview with the New Yorker, Zuckerberg attributed his success to Facebook’s larger mission. “The goal of the site is to increase people’s understanding of the world around them, to increase their information supply,” he said.

But Hagenmaier does not fully share that philosophical viewpoint. “I think it’s about social drama and gossip more than anything,” she said. “These things are always self-perpetuating.”

And a quick glance at a typical profile reveals just how much the site can be a sounding board for rumor and hearsay. In addition to favorite books and movies, students are invited to post more personal details relating to sexual orientation and relationship status. Many do. Of 10 profiles viewed at random, seven reported whether the site subject was involved in a relationship.

One student - who asked not to be named - said he had found out about his roommate’s recent breakup while browsing the site.

“I was looking up my roommate’s profile,” he said, “and his relationship status had changed. It used to be ‘In a Relationship,’ and suddenly it said, ‘Single.’ Everybody saw it and knew at the same time.”

It’s not surprising that privacy concerns have haunted Facebook since its inception. However, unlike its main competitors - Friendster and MySpace - Facebook has a number of privacy controls that allow users to regulate who can view their information. As an additional precaution against online voyeurism, users can only access the information of people at their school. In other words, it’s hard to stalk someone online who couldn’t have been stalked just as easily in person.

But that hasn’t been enough to cause everyone to jump on the bandwagon.

“I didn’t log on to Facebook once this year until today,” said Melissa Fusco, a Los Altos native who graduated from Stanford in June.

On her profile, Fusco is pictured as an upright alligator, a practical joke engineered by one of her Stanford friends after Fusco accidentally left her computer logged on to the site.

“I guess I should change it back,” she said. “But I’m on Facebook about as often as I check my spam mail.”

Fusco, however, is in the minority. Statistics published last year by the blog TechCrunch reported that of the site’s users, 60 percent log on daily, 85 percent visit at least once weekly and 93 percent log on at least once a month.

“It’s a great site for having photos, and maybe that’s what has a lot of people returning,” Hagenmaier said.

Facebook is the most popular online site for sharing pictures, with more than 1.5 million photos uploaded daily (users may upload an unlimited number of photo files).

With its photos, profiles and target audience of college students primed for online media, Facebook seems to have created a way for people to see and be seen without ever having to leave their PC. Facebook continues to expand, now attempting to bring high school and business communities into its fold. Zuckerberg could not have created a billion-dollar company in just two years without having tapped into some basic communication need. The program appears unstoppable.

“I have a few friends who refuse to join,” Hagenmaier said. “But they’ll cave in eventually.”