“A lot of people really wanted to kill him,” says Andrew S. Obus ’03. “But in real life, he’s actually pretty shy.”

Kazen says that most e-group members react with surprise when they meet him in person.

“Everyone expects me to be the 4-foot-5 kid with glasses,” he says.

Kazen is neither.

As the e-group’s most prolific member, Kazen even made efforts to bring members together outside of cyberspace.

During his first year, he tried holding up a sign that said “e-group” in Annenberg.

When dining hall checker Domna Antoniou reprimanded Kazen for illegal advertising, he explained that without the sign, no one would know who he was.

The dining hall manager eventually gave him permission to keep it up.

Kazen’s efforts may have helped to make the 2003 e-group something of a lasting unit within their class.

In September 1999 when The Crimson published an article about prefrosh social groups that were falling apart, Golder wrote a letter to the editor insisting that the e-group friendships would “transcend the Internet and...become real bonds.”

For some members it did.

Oliver B. Libby ’03 says many of the people who formed the “core group” ended up blocking together.

He says he met his roommate Howard A. Levine ’03 and one-time girlfriend Sarah C. Hull ’03 through e-group postings.

“There are definitely several e-group couples,” Libby says.

But the group was mostly useful, Libby and others say, for sharing information and creating a sense of community at the beginning of the first year.