Some students might remember the days when their in-boxes were flooded with e-mails prompting them to join Club Nexus, which was launched in full force over a year ago. An on-line network designed to enhance relationships among students in the Stanford community, Club Nexus gained many new members before its creators went on to conceive the successful inCircle, part of the Stanford Alumni Association’s efforts to enhance virtual interaction among Stanford graduates.

So whatever happened to Club Nexus? According to Orkut Buyukkokten, one of the site’s creators who finished his graduate work in computer science at Stanford last spring, the server was attacked by a hacker, temporarily turning it into a pornography site. He stressed however, that the set-back was only temporary and he still works on maintaining the site. Buyukkokten said that publicity for the site has decreased because everyone involved in the program is no longer attending Stanford.

Buyukkokten, who now works at Google full time, said there were seven people working on the project: three graduate students and four undergraduates, all of whom graduated last year.

Buyukkokten had the idea for Club Nexus when he noticed how hard it was for people, especially graduate students, to meet new people.

“People seemed to have made most of their friends in their freshman year,” he said. “I thought it would be nice to have an on-line Web site. Initially, we had 50 people sign up, who were mostly our friends.”

He said that six weeks after the launch, there were already 1,500 members.

“It became extremely vital,” Buyukkokten said. “The surprising thing was that it was [used by] mostly undergrads.”

He said he had been expecting most of the users to be graduate students. However, 80 percent of users ended up being undergraduates, with the other 20 percent of users graduate students.

Tyler Ziemann, who also worked on the project as an undergraduate in political science, is now president and CEO of Affinity Engines, which runs and maintains Club Nexus.

“The summer of 2002 we all got together and thought it would be a fun idea to map the social network of Stanford students,” Ziemann said.

As project manager, creative director and overall director of the project, Ziemann also looked for ways to expand Club Nexus.

“We talked to people at the venture company, Concept2Company, and that’s when we began working with the Alumni Association.”

Affinity Engines’ first project was turning the ideas and experiences from Club Nexus into inCircle for the Alumni Association.

“The online community has a lot more use value there,” Ziemann said. “As an undergrad, most of your friends live across the hall — you see them on a frequent basis. For alumni, it’s a great facilitator of reconnecting with lost friends.

He stressed that inCircle was also good for finding useful business connections, and that with the Alumni site, the “utility value is greater.”

Buyukkokten said that inCircle has become “extremely successful and vital.” An off-shoot of stanfordalumni.org, the site gets between 800 and 2,000 unique log-ins per day.

“All the seniors who graduated last year started using the Web site,” Buyukkokten said. “It was simply a transition for them.”

Ryan Barrett, who is coterming in computer science, said he uses both Club Nexus and inCircle.

“The core idea of it is really useful,” Barrett said in an article appearing in Stanford Magazine. “It gives you a good context to know who someone is when you know who their group of friends is.”

Barrett said he would like to see Club Nexus as popular as what it once was. He still uses the site for the “random, fun” community-type aspects like Karma Net. However, he said that inCircle has more users and lists more events.

Club Nexus currently has 2,200 members. Three and a half weeks after inCircle launched in January, 10,652 alumni had logged in.

Coterminal student in Sociology, Caroline Campbell, who was part of the team that got Club Nexus up and running, said that she gave input on design decisions and helped brainstorm ways to market it to the Stanford community.

Though she is no longer a part of the team, Campbell said it was unfortunate that Club Nexus wasn’t as popular as it once was.

“I still believe in the basic idea of Club Nexus, but I think a lot of work would need to be done to give it widespread appeal and make it part of the campus scene,” Campbell said.

Some of the most popular aspects of Club Nexus site were “Hot or Not,” which received picture submissions, and “Karma Net,” which allowed users to rate their friends based on how nice, sexy, cool or trustworthy they were. These ratings were eventually turned into a top-10 list.

“We launched it thinking it would be super fun,” Ziemann said. “Initially we had 40 people, and we sent an e-mail to the people they had ranked warning them that if they didn’t rank people, they would be ranked poorly.”

Ziemann said they hacked Stanford.Who to better facilitate the site.

“We had to hack the Stanford database to get every student’s e-mails,” Ziemann said. “It made it so people, when adding friends to the database, didn’t have to look up their e-mails. Orkut wrote a script that would query the Stanford.Who database every five seconds. I don’t think they ever found out.”

Kristin Ducrest, a junior, signed up for Club Nexus last year after receiving a “barrage of e-mails.”

“I signed up because I was curious,” Ducrest said. “However, it was a disappointment.”

She added that in her dorm, “People talked about it a lot, but then it just kind of fizzled.”