The Super P-ton Facebook You Didn't Even Know Existed

For years, there's been an online, frequently updated, comprehensive, semi-facebook of over 3,500 Princeton affiliated individuals, and we just never knew. Don't believe me? Well, read on. And look here.From 2003 until this past summer, David Dobkin, a COS professor, served as the Dean of the Faculty. Working from Nassau Hall, Dobkin met with students and faculty daily and wanted to create a living memory of his tenure and the people he met. So he put up 1,500 (seemingly random) photos of of students and faculty, tagged by individual, on his personal Princeton page, which can be found here.The individually tagged photo blog apparently has another unexpected use. "It evolved into a useful tool for people around the university who wondered what others looked like.  It has been used by many people to identify people they had to meet," he said via e-mail.Well, let's dive in:On the front page, there's a great picture of University leaders at the beach. Some explanation from Prof. Dobkin helps: "One year after graduation, it was hot in our robes, so we went to the beach :-)" In this situation, ":-)" indicates Photoshop use.Then you can look at hundreds of pictures of random professors, staff, and students from the class of '01 until now. What's amazing is that since they're tagged individually, you can search by name, class year/department, or by day taken. Yes, it's down to the day.  All together, it ends up being a really cool collection of Princeton headshots and candides from across the years.Want to find a picture of Cornel West from 2007? You're in luck, it's here.Or how about Robby George from 2005 and 2007? Covered also, here.There's also Richard Just, alumnus and current visiting Ferris professor, from Reunions in 2011, here.The tagging took a while: "I wrote a few computer scripts to turn photos into proof sheets and to enable adding text to proof sheets to create web pages.  This was originally used to record my history with my family.  When I became dean, I expanded the scripts I had written to record people by name, by date and by department."But thanks to Prof. Dobkin, I've got tons of Princeton history to search through.