Goodbye awkward small talk. Hello thefacebook.com.

As if students needed another outlet for procrastination, Boston University was added to the newly formed online community thefacebook.com Sunday evening and almost 200 BU students have already registered, Site Public Relations Director Chris Hughes said Tuesday.

“We chose to expand to BU for a variety of reasons,” Hughes said, “but primarily because we felt like it had a strong relationship with two other schools that have flourished on the network – Harvard [University] and [the Massachusetts Institute of Technology]. Making friend connections between previously existing schools and the new one is an important way for the site to grow.”

On thefacebook.com, a service similar to Friendster.com, registered students can post personal information, including their political views, favorite quotes and whether they are interested in meeting for “random play,” “dating” or other options. Participants can then search for people, send each other messages and add each other to their list of friends.

There is even an ambiguous option to “poke” other members. According to the website, the team that created thefacebook.com “thought it would be fun to make a feature that has no specific purpose and to see what happens from there.”

When registering under marital status, users can pick from “married,” “single,” “in a relationship” or “in an open relationship.”

Ten schools are currently available on thefacebook.com, including Harvard, Columbia University, Stanford University, Yale University, Cornell University, Dartmouth College, the University of Pennsylvania, MIT and now BU and New York University. In total, there are 24,500 members on the site and none of the original eight schools have fewer than 1,000 users, according to the site.

Harvard sophomore Mark E. Zuckerberg launched thefacebook.com last February with popular site Friendster.com as a model. However, the scope of the site, according to Hughes, is noticeably different from that of Friendster.

“Thefacebook.com does not aim to be a mini-version of Friendster,” Hughes said. “Whereas Friendster is a global network that includes millions of people, the school networks on thefacebook.com are separated from one another and tend to have at most 8,000 members. This means that thefacebook.com is much more a tool for community usage.”

The network’s smaller scale appealed to College of Arts and Sciences sophomore Rebecca Ganzer.

“I am [also] a member of Friendster but I find it rather unuseful,” she said. “Becoming friends with someone in your social network is unlikely because the people are scattered throughout the U.S. With the facebook, if you find someone of interest, you know you can act on it.”

Since the site was created, site administrators have added an option that allows students to search for friends by class schedule, adding an academic focus to many members’ interactions and allowing the site to “serve as an informational resource for students,” Hughes said.

“The class list can help to build study groups or direct questions about material, just as the informational section can help people get phone numbers [and] email addresses,” he said.

For some, thefacebook.com presents a simple and addictive mode of procrastination similar to services like AOL Instant Messenger. For others, the site offers an opportunity to meet peers at large schools like BU.

“I decided to join the facebook because in such a huge and impersonal school, it is always nice to have something else that lessens the gap,” Ganzer said.

Other students said they are interested in the sociological implications of such sites.

“It’s always an interesting social experiment to see the first impressions people get from looking at a picture of your face, especially when you strategically pick a more attractive one,” CAS sophomore and thefacebook.com member Marianna Staroselsky said. “People are much more uninhibited in voicing these kinds of first impressions by way of a medium as impersonal as the internet.”

If BU’s numbers follow other schools’ trends, Hughes said he expects about 400 members to be registered as of today.