His brother was a meaty metalhead (and consequently a personal hero of mine) so I figured it was some sort of creepy cultish leather tome with yellowed pages and predictions about how each one of us would inevitably meet our untimely, grisly demise. I was wrong - that was Craigslist. But, like so many cripplingly insecure and regularly unwashed college freshman boys, I joined it anyway, and it soon changed - even became - my life.

This was ages ago - long before the first Rick had ever been Rolled - and it was a very different website then. There were no photos, no groups, and no messages - just a profile picture, interests, and a wall. Students could not friend students at other colleges. In fact, most colleges weren't on Facebook. In retrospect, it was a primitive and dim space to socialize, not unlike a hipster bar in an NYC bomb shelter, or Olympic Stadium in Montreal (poor Youppi!).

It's been a little over four years since then. And though I still can't grow a decent beard, oh how the times have changed!

Facebook now has over 300 million members. Over 80 billion photos have been uploaded, and over 600,000 are viewed every minute. Brody Ruckus has given way to Billabong. Like a scruffy college graduate who has somehow managed to bluff his way into a real job, Facebook has hit the big time, and now actually gets taken seriously.

And for good reason too. All organizations - profit or nonprofit, private or public - require human capital to produce their goods or spread their message. We're all people powered, and sites like Facebook are our cold fusion. When asked why he robbed banks, diminutive miscreant Willie Sutton replied "because that's where the money is." Well, organizations love Facebook (and other social network sites) because that's where the people are.

So starting today, you'll see a "Share on Facebook" link at the bottom of every blog entry. By clicking this link, you may choose to publish the article to the News Feed of your five thousand closest Friends on Facebook. Everybody wins. Your Friends will see cool content they may have never stumbled across otherwise. You get to be the dude or dudette who provides the hook-up. And we get to spread our message to people who might otherwise never have seen it.

That's why they call it "social media" - because it is animated by and conducted within our preexisting social circles. But within this promise of social media lies its peril.

We know that even if you love MIT, you may not want MIT to be where your friends are, jumping in where it is isn't wanted like that awkward kid in high school who invited himself over to your house and would let himself in and begin eating your Cheetos while loudly criticizing your Tekken techniques. And we want to respect your wishes, even if you ARE a certifiable moron for going with the Armor King over Ganryu.

But it's not that simple, because we don't know what your wishes are. Some studies show that prospective students prefer for school to contact them via Facebook. Others suggest that students prefer email for these sorts of inquiries, and would like for Spam U. to let them Farmville in peace. We also know that different students use different social spaces online, and that no one site represents all the students we might like to speak with.

The best way for MIT to achieve the potential of these social sites is for y'all to guide us around their pitfalls. Our new "Share" links are relatively unproblematic and uncontroversial, and I hope you will use them (perhaps even on this post!) However, as we move forward, we'll be looking to you (collectively) for guidance. What social spaces do you use when you're thinking about, researching, or discussing college applications? What social activities or practices (apps, chats, pages, etc) would you like to see more of? Would you play an MIT Farmville or Mafia Wars, and would you share it with your friends who'd never thought of MIT because they'd find it fun too?

I actually do believe in viral marketing, which is to say that I believe promotions can be as fun to experience as they are effective at messaging. But here at the Admissions Office, we're all (sadly, even myself) old fogeys, and the only "hip" thing for us is the prosthetic kind. So tell me, what could we create in the crowdsourced Web 2.0 blogosphere networked public buzzword universe that would be fun, educational, and social for you?

As one of the constitutive elements of this new borg-Ben newly arisen from the digital ooze, my job is to help make the Internet go for the Admissions Office. If I wanted to be "professional" - which is to say, if I wanted to obscure my individual unimportance behind interlocking bulkheads of buzzwords, like a pufferfish wrapped in chain mail and festooned with mines - I would say that I leverage social software to facilitate digital conversations between MIT and its latent global community. If I wanted to be truthful, I'd say I try to use cool technology to help MIT and prospective students talk to each other.

This blog is a huge part of that effort. It's fairly incredible that MIT allows both current and prospective students to converse openly as they do on this site. It is perhaps unsurprising that MIT jumped aboard the cluetrain in this regard - to paraphrase Matt McGann, Tim Berners-Lee does work upstairs, and if we didn't use the web as a way to freely share information he'd probably whack us upside the head - but it is no less unique for that. The fact of the matter is that MIT could survive without this blog and avoid a lot of potential headaches and most of my salary. However, the Institvte recognizes that conversations bring communities together, and so here we are, sharing our hopes and dreams through wires and screens and it's awesome enough that I'll even put up with Dave's lolcats to be a part of that vision.

One thing I'd like to do is figure out some shiny new toys to add to the already shiny site we have here. Dave and I are working on some Top Secret web projects that we'll be rolling out in the indefinite future, projects that will help the entire MIT community (past, current, and prospective) share its considerable collective intelligence and enrich all involved. In the tradition of a true webitocracy, if anyone has any ideas about cool tools or features they'd like to see incorporated into the website, please post something about it and why you think it rocks. Time permitting and FSM willing, we'll see if we can work it in.

I can't wait to work with all of you to continue to build what Ben began: an intergalactic space empire run by an alien witch living in a dumpster on the moon a first-class online community for some of the best and brightest students in the world.