Gillis’ group has 883 members and counting. The latest controversy on the boards? Where exactly in California to relocate the university.

In a parody, Adam M. Guren ’08 also created Students for the Relocation of Harvard University to the Alternate Universe Where Kerry Won. “I was depressed about the election,” writes Guren, who is also a Crimson comper. “I was also curious about what would happen—how the group would spread or if it would.” Guren’s group went from 15 members to 193 in a matter of weeks. For Guren, the group wasn’t so much a political statement as a “joke for other students who were depressed about the election and were not sure what to do.”

The members of Red Sox Nation shared all the intense moments of the championship season on the group’s message board.

“I started Red Sox Nation when my roommate said she was in the Yankee Empire [group] and they had something like 100 members. I mean, I knew we could top that,” says Teresa A. Hsiao ’07, founder of the group, which now has 688 members. “At first it was more for venting and frustration and a common space for long-suffering Red Sox fans.” Now, she says, fans of all intensities enjoy the site.

The proliferation of groups has given rise to groups like Harvard Students Who Love Facebook Groups to a new kind of facebook figure: the facebook group whore.

“Most of [the groups I’m in] I was invited to, since I have a pretty big group of friends, and a lot of them started different groups,” Jennifer R. Popack ’08, a member of 25 groups, writes in an e-mail. “I don’t think that there are many ‘real groups’ that I joined that have any real significance, they’re more just because I know the jokes behind them, and that makes them amusing.”

Whether groups on the facebook exist to get serious business done or to really get nothing significant accomplished at all, students are hooked.

“It’s nice to see that so many people care so much,” says Hsiao. “But then again, it’s just a facebook group.”