With the popularity of Facebook and MySpace, it may come as no surprise that the University has adopted a similar virtual community accessible to only Illinois alumni, current students, faculty and staff.

Always Illinois, an InCircle community with Affinity Circles as the service provider, is a professional and social networking community offering a lifelong free service for alumni, students and faculty to remain connected. Always Illinois’ goal is to make certain the virtual community will remain relevant and useful for the users, said Angela Dimit, director of advancement in the college of Engineering and project manager of the Always Illinois launch.

“We want to be in the business to help students to stay connected and this is the best way to do it,” Dimit said. “Connectivity is very important.”

With an additional level of privacy and security, Always Illinois is different from other social networking sites because of its strong career component. Rather than competing with the social networks, Always Illinois was created to maintain a professional element. University alumni can post job listings based on geographical locations, both domestic and international, for other alumni and students.

“I think this could be a great networking site,” said Katrina Appell, University alumna. “The key is what is social networking and what is professional networking.”

Other Always Illinois features include the ability to create professional groups dedicated to Registered Student Organizations for past, current and future organization members.

“We expect students to maintain their Facebook and MySpace accounts,” Dimit said. “What we’re looking at is achieving different outcomes.”

The idea to initiate a social networking site originated from a computer science alumnus, Jeff Holden.

Always Illinois was originally launched in September 2006 only for engineering alumni.

Engineering students and faculty were added to the site in February 2007.

The success of the engineering virtual community intrigued Chancellor Herman and resulted in the evolution of a campuswide community, Dimit said.

An e-mail invitation to register was sent to approximately 85,000 University alumni on Aug. 7 and the e-mail invitations to current students soon followed.

Faculty and staff members will receive their official e-mail invitations sometime later this week.

Despite Always Illinois’ features, some students have expressed disinterest in registration.

“I just don’t have a reason to (register)”, said Rich Schweighart, senior in Engineering. “I don’t need to be a part of another online community.”

However, Schweighart added he might consider registering nearer to graduation. Since Sept. 4, 11,339 individuals have registered.

“Affinity Circles is just astounded at the success not only of the rate at which students and alumni are registering, but the level of activity once people have registered,” Dimit said. “It’s just phenomenal.”