CUCommunity-Facebook War
The CUCommunity-Facebook War was a conflict waged between active members of Columbia social network CUCommunity and an inferior personal profile website founded by a student at an inferior 'peer' school. The records of the 'war', such as it was, consist largely of calls to arms and action by Columbia students on CUCommunity (CUCom featured journals and comments long before facebook had 'notes' and any sort of interactivity), which unfortunately have been lost to time, and reporting by the Spectator and Harvard Crimson.
Google-bombing campaign
The key feature the war was an attempt by Cody Hess C'06 to Google-bomb a number of sites, including associting thefacebook.com with the search “CUcommunity ripoff”, harvard.edu with “worthless safety school”, columbiaspectator.com with “worthless rag newspaper”. Hess was interviewed by the Harvard Crimson during this episode and explained that "It’s important for people at Columbia to know that they’re better than people at other colleges." Hess's attempts were unsuccessful and ultimately led to his own website's search-ranking being significantly dropped by Google, or as he called it "Google-murdered."
The short-lived fight with facebook also led to a feud between CUCommunity users and the Spectator, which CUCom users felt was ignoring CUCommunity, and then promoting Facebook at CUCommunity's expense.
Timeline of events
Major events in bold
- January 29, 2004- Columbia Spectator Staff Editorial endorsing the efforts of CUCommunity
- February 25, 2004- Spectator News Article on CUCommunity
- March 04, 2004- Spectator News Article announcing the arrival of thefacebook.com at Columbia
- March 05, 2004- CUCommunity Journal of Adam Goldberg's, founder of CUCom, on thefacebook and accusations of shoddy journalism by the Spectator
- March 05, 2004- CUCommunity Journal of Rob Spinella, calling for google-bomb war on facebook.com
- March 05, 2004- CUCommunity Journal of Cody Hess, answering Rob Spinella's call and declaring war
- March 06, 2004- CUCommunity Journal of Cody Hess, relating transcript of interview with the Crimson
- March 07, 2004- CUCommunity Journal of Rob Spinella, on the declaration of war, and Crimson interview of his own
- March 09, 2004- Harvard Crimson News Article on the google-bomb campaign
- March 09, 2004- CUCommunity Journal of Cody Hess, responding to Crimson News Article
- March 11, 2004- Crimson Staff Editorial belittling any attempt to stop the facebook.
- March 11, 2004- CUCommunity Journal of Cody Hess, responding to 2nd Crimson article
- March 11, 2004- CUCommunity Journal of Rob Spinella, accusing the Crimson of shoddy journalism
- March 17, 2004- CUCommunity Journal of Rob Spinella, concerning successes and failures of the campaign
- March 22, 2004- Spectator News Article announces end of CUCom-Facebook war
- April 05, 2004- Spectator Opinion Column by Tao Tan glorifying the war and swearing to fight on