998 was a busy year for technology: Google was founded, and so was the online Leverett House facebook. Created by a small group of students and faculty members, the House facebook was designed to bring House members together. It was a technology that could have helped bolster undergraduate life across the University.

Instead, it became thefacebook.com.

Before online House facebooks, looking a student up meant flipping through pages and pages of an annually printed face book. “It’s out of date as soon as it’s printed,” former Leverett House Dean Howard M. Georgi says. On the other hand, an online facebook would be “a growing and living object.”

In 1996, Daniel J. Ellard ’86 began as a Lowell House resident tutor and, at the suggestion of Lowell’s faculty dean at the time, began working on an online House facebook to make the paper books more interactive. Lowell wasn’t the only House with the project. Eliot had an online facebook at the time, and Stuart Schechter pitched the idea for Leverett House when he became a resident tutor in 1998.

Georgi, who was Leverett’s faculty dean from 1998 to 2018, was beyond enthusiastic because he wanted “to get to know every student by name, and that was not so easy with 500 students.”

Schechter recalls that Georgi “had a huge amount of energy, and he cared so much about undergrads and the undergrad experience that he was willing to put a huge amount of time and effort to getting things right.”

Georgi’s contributions included attending meetings with administrators to address concerns about the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, obtaining student photos and identifying information from the ID office, and securing the official leverett.harvard.edu domain. Thanks to Georgi, Schechter faced few obstacles in building the online facebook, and the pieces came together in time for the fall 1998 semester.

Surfing the depths of Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, one can find frozen snapshots of the Leverett House website starting in November 1999. The front page is faithfully reproduced in the 2010 movie “The Social Network,” which dramatized Facebook’s beginnings. The web design is reminiscent of Craigslist, with white Times New Roman font overlaid on green boxes. It announces who has a birthday today or tomorrow, displays a picture gallery depicting students laughing at various House events, and, of course, links to the online facebook. The website was built by Schechter, along with student Yia Hang ’01, in PHP with a MySQL database backend over a summer break.

Without a Leverett login username and password, someone searching the internet would only be able to find the students whose privacy levels were set to publicly available. Within Leverett House, any student, tutor, or dean could search for a student and their information, including their ID picture, concentration, entryway, birthday, a self-authored bio, and who their roommates were. Surprisingly, not too many students put much information into their bios because the other categorical information was useful enough.

Tutors could use the facebook to contact a student’s roommates if they ended up at the University Health Services. Parents could learn about their child’s roommates and see photos from the House. And Georgi’s favorite feature was a name game that would display a student photo and require the player to identify the student.

“The website had everything we needed to build House community,” Schechter says.

He describes clear benefits to giving every student access to a University-wide online facebook where they could find photos, contact information, and roommate networks, but, despite it seeming straightforward to centralize the project, red tape kept getting in the way.

Over the course of many meetings, the school got caught on details and logistics, such as getting external vendors to cater to the idiosyncratic name “concentrations” rather than “majors.” Other students reached out to Schechter every year about using the data, and he would respond to them saying that the data were owned by Harvard. Georgi even remembers meeting with Mark E. Zuckerberg about improving technology at the College.

When asked why the online facebooks were never connected across Houses, Georgi replies that it was “not for lack of trying.”

On February 4, 2004, Zuckerberg published a website that, confusingly, borrowed its name from these online House facebooks. He was tired of waiting for a “universal face book within Harvard,” The Crimson reported at the time. Schechter remembers how students would refer to thefacebook.com as “Zuckerberg’s” Facebook or “the new one” because the term “facebook” had referred to the paper and online House facebooks for so long. In comparison to the Leverett House facebook, Schechter reflects that the new Facebook had “smooth and slick” web design, shared mobile numbers across Houses at a time when everyone was getting phones, made it much easier for students to change their profile photos, and involved non-House-sponsored information such as relationship status.

Years later, the online House facebooks have become all but a memory. Their lesson, however, still stands. “What our facebook shows you is that there are really valuable things you can do with this technology to build community,” Georgi says, “and I’m afraid that the experience in the world since then shows that there are lots of things you can do to eliminate community.”

Schechter says it didn’t matter to him if people knew who built the House facebooks, adding that it was enough to be a part of a group where “people know who you are and appreciate you.”

On the other hand, thefacebook.com displayed the tagline “a Mark Zuckerberg production,” and over time, it grew clear to Schechter and Georgi that Zuckerberg’s Facebook was more of a business than a tool for fostering school-wide culture.

Much of what universities contribute to the world today, as new technology calls into question the traditional value of education, is still their network. “In ’98,” Schechter recalls, “we were the leaders, and it was useful, and we could build community.”

“Universities could have owned this” technology, he says, and “that’s a world we could have had if Harvard had chose to help build that, and it’s still a world we could have if the right people decided that they wanted to make it happen.”