They kindled friendships, ignited fierce debates and even found romance.

The only problem was that few e-group members had actually met in person.

“If you met someone freshman week, you’d say ‘Oh, were you on the e-group?’ or ‘What was your screen-name?’” says M. Kate Richey ’03.

Richey says many e-group members stopped subscribing to the list a few weeks into their first year, when real-life relationships became a more reliable network for support.

But this May, during one of the seniors’ last weeks at Harvard, Grant organized the e-group’s first-ever reunion, giving many people a chance to match faces with screen names like “Italianstallion” and “Harvardboy03.”

On the appointed day, about 15 people congregate in the Dunster House Junior Common Room.

“Now I get to find out who all these essentially anonymous people are,” says Greene, who came to the reunion with Wilcox to solve the riddle of their meeting.

Golder, the e-group’s founder, brings a great deal of insight to the reunion.

As a linguistics concentrator, he wrote his senior thesis on “social roles and how they emerge in online communities.”

Next year, as graduate student at MIT, Golder will continue to research online social interaction.

Looking around the room, he says it’s easy to apply his newfound knowledge to the dynamics of the Class of 2003 e-group.

“Every group seems dominated by a few very prolific people,” he says. “I call them ‘central figures.’ They tie the community together.”

The reunion erupts in applause when one such figure arrives.

Jeffery D. Kazen ’03 is greeted with cheers of “Blazin’ Kazen!” and “Physics Guy!”—the tagline he used to sign many of his e-group postings.

He sits quietly on the couch at the end of the room, looking quite the opposite of his agressive online personality.