Facebook Wars of Yore

Whoa! Looks like Facebook may make its creators ridiculously rich--$2 billion rich. Considering it was created by a Harvard sophomore just two years ago, it's sort of mind boggling. Kinda makes you wish you were a college-age computer genius, huh?

But I sorta wonder how the creators of CUCommunity are feeling right now. What you might ask is CUCommunity? Exactly. Facebook has become a household word--even the Times said so--but CUCommunity is a has-been that almost no one has ever heard of. But the story is kinda fun, so here goes:

Once upon a time when Eli7 was a freshman (ahem, first-year) at Columbia, CUCommunity was born. It was a virtual community meant to unite the entire Columbia campus. Soon thereafter, Facebook was born and added Columbia to its network. The creators of CUCommunity felt that their territory was being usurped, so they did what any self-respecting Ivy League community builders would do:

They decided to Google-bomb anything supporting Facebook, which included that venerable newspaper of Columbia (they felt it had given more coverage to Facebook). The terms that they used and the Web sites they linked to:

• "worthless safety school" = Harvard
  
• "thefacebook" = CUCommunity
• "cucommunity ripoff" = Facebook
• "worthless rag newspaper" = Columbia Daily Spectator

Funny, right? But it gets better. A certain daily newspaper from a certain Ivy League college which is home to Facebook creators published an article about the Google-bombing, effectively sabotaging themselves, so that a Google search for "worthless rag newspaper" produced the Crimson. The only thing worse was that Spectator published an article about the fact that the Crimson sabotaged itself, thus sabotaging Spectator, which remains the first Web site when you Google "worthless rag newspaper."

Anyhow, back to the point: I kinda feel bad for the creators of CUCommunity who were so close yet so far from the fame and fortune of Facebook. I wonder how hard they're kicking themselves right about now.