Spring Break
First-year celebrates an unusual milestone
Samantha Urban, Associate Entertainment Editor, surban@smu.edu
Issue date: 9/20/07 Section: News
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Klimczak is the founder of "When I was your age, Pluto was a planet," the fourth largest group on Facebook. After only just over a year in existence, the group finally attained one million members at 7:30 p.m. on Monday.
"That's enough people to fill, like, 22 SMU stadiums," Klimczak said.
When the IAU made its decision in August 2006 to demote Pluto, Steven was a senior at Episcopal High School in Houston. He heard the verdict and came up with the idea for the Facebook group on the spot. He created the group that night.
"I only invited 150 people," he said. "That's all I've ever had to invite."
Within a month, the group had already attracted 50,000 members. By August 2007, the group had 883,000 members. Klimczak says the group owes a lot to the "Related Groups" sidebar on the right of every group page on Facebook and to the Facebook News Feed, which informs users of their friends' actions on Facebook.
"That's prime advertising," Klimczak said. "That helped it grow really quickly."
But why is the group so popular? Was the loss of Pluto really such a devastating blow?
Group member and junior advertising major Matt Lindner thinks the group is so large because it is a group that united everyone old enough to work a computer under a single cause.
"Regardless of the semantics, I will always consider it 'The Littlest Planet That Could,'" Lindner said. "Pluto's planethood affected nothing but a few textbooks and the rhythm of the song we used to learn its name.
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