CUCommunity-Facebook War

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The CUCommunity-Facebook War was a conflict waged in March 2004 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', 'comments' or any sort of interactivity), which unfortunately have been lost to time, and long-forgotten reporting by the Spectator and Harvard Crimson.

Google-bombing campaign

The key feature the war was an attempt by Cody Hess to Google-bomb a number of sites, including associating 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 "[i]t’s important for people at Columbia to know that they’re better than people at other colleges." Hess's attempts met limited success 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 ignored CUCommunity, and then promoted Facebook at CUCommunity's expense.

Timeline of events

Major events in bold

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