In the past, students would to thumb through the phonebook or paper copies of the directory to find contact information.

Then came the University’s online directory.

But today, contacting fellow students has grown beyond the scope of simply finding an e-mail address or phone number.

With the click of a mouse, students are able to access one another’s interests, classes and, perhaps most important, photos.

Facebook pictures can be quite misleading, though. Most people post their own pictures or a group picture. However, some people don’t have a picture posted, have a picture of their friends or simply post a clip-art picture taken from the Internet.

Jeremy Hall, a sophomore in computer science, has had both a picture of himself and a image taken from the Internet for his Facebook picture. Hall said he didn’t really have a reason for not displaying a picture of himself.

“I got tired of the picture I had up and really love that movie,” Hall said.

For some students, taking the right picture for Facebook is difficult.

“Finding the perfect Facebook picture is like a quest for the holy grail,” Anna Patton, a freshman in psychology, said.

The ability for students to show off in their personal environments became even bigger when Facebook added photo albums this year. Now, users can have hundreds of pictures showing off their personality through pictures.

The Web site also gives users the option of “tagging” their friends in the pictures they post. This automatically links the new photo to the tagged person’s profile.

This tag, however, can be removed — an option some students use to weed out bad pictures of themselves. It’s a practice some said is deceptive.

“Your Facebook picture shouldn’t make you look better than you do in person because that’s just cheating,” Patton said.

Patton said people often search for pictures that will get comments, pokes, friend requests or messages — a method to indirectly boost one’s own popularity.

“A slightly provocative picture that highlights your popularity and social status is likely to have people write on your wall or poke you,” said Patton.

Jared McCormick, a junior in construction engineering and management, didn’t have a Facebook picture posted for about a week. He first deleted his picture for “Metcalf Elimination,” a game he played in the dorm, but kept it down for a while because he “didn’t feel like putting one up.”

McCormick said he finally settled on a picture — a photo of his best friend’s dog.

“I want other people to look at my picture and say, ‘That’s a cute dog,'” McCormick said.

Looking ones best for a self-portrait is a tricky thing, students said, and is an important element when searching for the best photo to post on Facebook.

Tory Griffith, a freshman in political science, said she picked her picture because she is “just trying to show that [she is] a fun person.” She said she doesn’t like it when people pick pictures just because they look good.

“I like more real pictures where you’re having fun in them,” she said.

Patton, who changes her picture every couple of months, believes “[her Facebook picture] shows a little more spunk and a little more attitude than your run-of-the-mill Facebook picture.” Some people rarely change their Facebook pictures, while others change theirs almost daily.

“[People] have a certain image that they are trying to convey,” according to psychology professor Amy Halberstadt.

But the photos can be a double-edged sword, as they are often used to judge other users by looks alone.

“First impressions are certainly affected by physical attractiveness,” Halberstadt said. “There are some very good experimental studies that show that we respond to others based on our perceptions of who they are.” Not everyone on the Facebook network is trying to make the best first impression they can.

“Your Facebook picture should be more than just about getting pokes or people writing on your wall,” said Patton.