As college-student social networking site TheFacebook readies to reach 1,400 four-year colleges next month in the U.S., it is also preparing to expand a program for advertisers that allows them to create sponsored discussion groups for their products, reports MediaPost. MasterCard was the first sponsor, starting several months ago, with Apple and Victoria's Secret, among others, having since signed on.

Those groups are described as "paid promotions by an outside company" on Thefacebook's website. "The sponsor controls the look and feel of the group, but does not have access to its members' personal information or profiles," according to the site.

Thefacebook's regular groups allow students to create and gather around common interests, allowng students to become members and post on a message board that can be read by other group members or browsers.

"We've got 65 percent of the total registered user base coming back to the site every day during the school year," Matt Cohler, Thefacebook's vice-president of corporate development, is quoted as saying.

"Because people come to the site that often…we're doing billions of pageviews per month." Cohler predicted that after Facebook goes live on the new campuses, pageviews would top 7 billion per month.