Within hours of its sizzling debut, shares in the company, which has been operating in the red, soared as high as $30.76, nearly double the initial public offering price of $16 per share.

The stock closed at $27.64, with 6.97 million shares changing hands yesterday.

"Constant Contact has a great market opportunity, solid management team, a stellar investor group, and outstanding revenue growth rate - roughly 80 percent year-over-year," said Ben Howe, chief executive of America's Growth Capital, a research, trading, and investment banking firm focused on emerging growth.

Howe said that "extremely optimistic" investors also were motivated, in part, by the company's potential as a buyout target.

"That said," Howe added, investors were "paying too much today for what the company will hopefully deliver sometime in the future."

Other analysts were puzzled by the investor demand for what they saw as a somewhat risky stock.

The company was launched in 1998 and has 130,000 customers worldwide, among them small businesses and such nonprofit organizations as the United Way of America.

But it continues to rack up millions of dollars in losses per year. In the six months ended June 30, Constant Contact had revenue of $21 million, compared with $8.5 million for the first half of last year.

Its net losses were roughly $5.5 million, compared with a loss of about $2.8 million in the same period the year prior.

"From an investors' standpoint, they represent a slightly higher risk to me. You want to see the company scaling to profitability," said Brian Hamilton, chief executive of Sageworks, a provider of financial information.

Constant Contact's executives declined to comment yesterday.

Nonprofits that rely on Constant Contact to update donors and volunteers said they have been impressed with how easy the company's product makes it to send out polished e-mails, complete with photographs and graphics that look the same on the creator's screen as on the recipient's.

And, because computer filters have grown increasingly sophisticated, they applauded Constant Contact's tool that checks e-mail for the probability it would be blocked as uninvited "spam."

America SCORES New England, which provides after-school soccer and creative writing programs at 12 elementary and six middle schools in Boston, uses the software to send monthly updates to 1,000 families, teachers, community members, and donors.

Managing the mailing list to send such an e-mail, as the nonprofit will do to highlight an upcoming end-of-season poetry slam, took a half day using a different computer software program.

Now, Alex Meader, a development associate at the organization, says sending that e-mail takes just an hour's worth of work.

"It's a really easy tool to make professional looking e-mail," he said.

Through a partnership with Constant Contact, 1,294 United Way local affiliates get the e-marketing services for free - and can reach up to 13 million recipients.

Peter Hahn, director of United Way Creative Studio, predicts that so-called viral marketing could rapidly increase the nonprofit's reach.

New subscribers can opt in within the e-mail, with no extra work done by overworked United Way affiliates.

"We are really very excited about all of the potential of viral marketing," Hahn said.

"It does have the potential of exponential growth: You can start with very few names and possibly spread at a much faster rate than if we were to try to collect each of those names by ourselves."

Well before the appointed hour, exactly 2:38 pm on September 23, nearly a thousand people had gathered at tiny Reverend Thomas J. Williams Park in North Cambridge, waiting for . . . well, no one really knew. But with 20 seconds to go, they started counting down.

“Redonkulous,” is how 19-year-old Olin College sophomore Katherine Elliott explained it. Bound by a spirit of adventure that drew them from Arlington, Cleveland, Calgary, Moscow, and elsewhere, fans of xkcd — which bills itself as “a webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language”; the letters “xkcd” meaning nothing in particular — came to this place, at this time, to see what exactly would happen.

“Something’s already happened,” said 28-year-old Jesse Raymond, who’d traveled from upstate New York. “We’re all here.”

Fans of xkcd (go to xkcd.com), which is drawn in simple stick-figure form, are your romantic brand of geek, who see a challenge both in sorting through lines of code and in affairs of the heart. “[xkcd is about] computers, physics, mathematics, and what it’s like trying to be someone having relationships with people while being good at all those things,” said 53-year-old David Bass, a North Cambridge resident who brought his wife and three kids — all fans — to the gathering. Around him, people wore T-shirts sporting equations, traded in-jokes about velociraptors, engaged in spontaneous foam-sword duels, and hauled a mattress to the top of a jungle gym they had overtaken.

Randall Munroe, the 22-year-old creator of the comic, moved to the area in June. A former NASA scientist with a degree in physics, he can appeal to his fans’ unique sense of humor. And they thank him for it.

“One of my friends characterized it very well as, ‘Oh my God, there’s someone in my head reading my thoughts and making a webcomic about them,’ ” said John Ostwald, a 27-year-old software developer from Newton.

The meet-up was prompted by a March comic entitled “Dream Girl,” in which Munroe’s stick-figure narrator recounts meeting a girl in a dream who urgently whispered a date and time and the mapping coordinates — 42.39561, -71.13051 — of Williams Park in his ear. The narrator goes there at the appointed moment but, as he sadly concludes, “It turns out wanting something doesn’t make it real.”

But hundreds of people decided to make it just that. “Dream Girl” was enough to bring Alex Norris here all the way from England.

“I saw that, and I got my credit card out and booked the plane ticket,” said the 34-year-old IT-support technician, who participated in a tape-measure length competition during the gathering.

“I think it’s really amazing because there was absolutely no planning that went into this,” said Claire Bailey, an 18-year-old student at MIT. “It was all just people acting independently and coming together as one.”

So at 2:38 pm, the crowd cheered and applauded . . . and waited. Then Munroe appeared. “Dream Girl” had been enlarged onto giant white boards and affixed to a fence, with blank boards hung alongside.

“Maybe wanting something does make it real,” Munroe told the assembled fandom. “Clearly, the comic needs to be corrected.”

With that, Sharpies were distributed and the fans took their turn with the pen. Among the comments scribbled on the new last “panel” of the comic were “xkcd is made of people,” “First post?!,” and “I came all the way from NYC to have my dream come true.”

Later, Munroe was 10-deep in a throng of geeks, autographing everything from a Rubix cube to an exposed breast to a picture of two buffalo mating.

“The comic said that no one was going to show up,” said Munroe, an unassuming-looking guy in a striped green T-shirt. “On the other hand, you draw the comic and other people get the same idea and maybe that is how things do happen.”

Adrian Sud, a 21-year-old UMass-Amherst student, says it was a happy ending. “All the fans, if nothing had happened, we would have been perfectly content. But something happened, and that just makes the world for us.”

All I needed was an attractive profile photo (easier said than done) and a well-curated list of interests to meet the friends I always dreamed I'd have in college: people who preferred Faulkner over Hemingway, liked thrift shopping and wanted to sneak into Chicago jazz clubs. Facebook became my dry-erase tabula rasa. Under favorite quote, I wrote "True friends stab you in the front," as Oscar Wilde said. For the section titled "About Me," I said, "I like to write, but writing 'about me' is difficult."

A week after Google made headlines by opening up Google News to commentary, the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard University is weighing in with an interesting study: Creative Destruction: An Exploratory Look at News on the Internet.

The center looked at traffic to 160 news Web sites over the last year and found overall traffic leveling off. But there were some telling distinctions. Newspapers with national brands, like the New York Times, Washington Post and USA Today, saw their audiences grow, on average, 10 percent over the year. Most other newspapers lost visitors.

In television, brand-name networks like CNN, MSNBC Fox and the traditional TV networks grew by 30 percent on average. Local TV and radio stations grew also, but more slowly.

And blowing everyone away were news aggregators like Yahoo News, Google News and smaller sites like Topix.net and Digg.com.

From the report:

The Web particularly threatens daily newspapers. They were among the first to post news on the Internet but their initial advantage has all but disappeared in the face of increased competition from electronic media and non-traditional providers. The Internet is also a larger threat to local news organizations than those with national reputations. Because it reduces the influence of geography on people’s choice of a news source, the Internet inherently favors “brand names”—those relatively few news organizations that readily come to mind by Americans everywhere when they seek news on the Internet.

Nancy Palmer, executive director of the Shorenstein Center, said the decline of audiences for local papers and television stations is a potentially significant loss. “People need to be involved in their communities. If the way they are finding their news leapfrogs their community to someplace they don’t live, like New York or Los Angeles or Washington, how are they going to know what is going on in their town? Being a good citizen is all about having a solid base of knowledge. That is hard to d

The owners of a rival social networking Web site are trying to shut down Facebook.com, charging in a federal lawsuit that Facebook's founder stole their ideas while they were students at Harvard.

The three founders of Connecticut-based ConnectU say Mark Zuckerberg agreed to finish computer code for their site, but repeatedly stalled and eventually created Facebook using their ideas.

The lawsuit's allegations against Zuckerberg include fraud, copyright infringement and misappropriation of trade secrets. It asks the court to shut down Facebook and give control of the company and its assets to ConnectU's founders.

A hearing on a motion to dismiss the lawsuit is scheduled for Wednesday in U.S. District Court in Boston.

Facebook started in 2004, a few months before ConnectU went online, and now has 31 million users from various age groups, compared with about 70,000 users for ConnectU, based in Greenwich, Conn. Last year, Facebook turned down a $1 billion offer from Yahoo Inc.

A spokeswoman for Palo Alto, Calif.-based Facebook declined comment, citing the pending litigation.

In court filings, Facebook's attorneys say ConnectU has no evidence for "broad-brush allegations" against Zuckerberg, and deny he pilfered his ideas for Facebook from his fellow Harvard students.

"Each of them had different interests and activities," they wrote. "Only one of them had an idea significant enough to build a great company. That one person was Mark Zuckerberg."

Facebook and ConnectU connect college students and others online. Both allow users to post profiles with pictures, biographies and other personal information and create extended networks of people at their schools or jobs or with similar interests.

ConnectU originally filed suit in September 2004, but it was dismissed on a technicality in March and immediately refiled. The lawsuit claims that in December 2002 ConnectU founders Cameron Winklevoss and Tyler Winklevoss -- who are brothers -- and Divya Narenda began to develop a social networking site for the Harvard community called Harvard Connection.

In November 2003, the three asked Zuckerberg to complete software and database work on the site. They repeatedly asked him to finish before they graduated in June 2004, and Zuckerberg assured them he was working hard to complete it, the lawsuit says.

"Such statements were false and Zuckerberg never intended to provide the code and instead intended to breach his promise ... and intended to steal the idea for the Harvard Connection website, and in fact he did so," the suit alleges.

Zuckerberg launched Thefacebook.com in February 2004. ConnectU started its Web site in May of that year. By beating ConnectU to the market, Facebook gained a huge advantage, the lawsuit claims.

ConnectU's founders were not immediately available for comment on Wednesday. On their Web site, they wrote about the "ups and downs" of their company history, including a programmer "who stole our ideas to create a competing site."

"But we've been troopers," they wrote. "At first we were devastated and climbed into a bottle of Jack Daniels for a bit, but eventually emerged with a bad headache and renewed optimism. We weren't going to lie down and get walked over like this."

In court documents, Zuckerberg's attorneys say ConnectU has no evidence of any contracts with Zuckerberg or that what it shared with him were trade secrets

The Internet can seem an all-knowing, mysterious oracle. Type in a question, hit a button and an answer magically appears.

Yet oracles earn their robes not for providing trivia (“Caesar, did you know that “ides” is a Latin term denoting half a month?”), but for predicting the future, however Delphically. And for a brief period recently, the Internet seemed to have crossed that threshold.

The backdrop was the bizarre tale of the professional wrestler Christopher Benoit who during one weekend last month killed his wife, Nancy, and later his son and himself. The police didn’t find the bodies until Monday afternoon, June 25, but a Wikipedia entry on Mr. Benoit had reported his wife’s death matter-of-factly 13 hours earlier.

Was there some error with the time stamped on the article? Was a witness choosing to speak under cover of anonymity? Or was the killer posting a final warning? Intriguingly, the IP address used to write the prophetic posting was traced to Stamford, Conn., which happens to be the home of World Wrestling Entertainment, the employer of Mr. Benoit.

As a furor grew, the anonymous user of Wikipedia who posted the Nancy Benoit information (known by the IP address 69.120.111.23) came forward to say, “I did the wrong thing by posting it on Wikipedia,” adding, “I was just as shocked as everyone when I heard that this actually would happen in real life.”

The police nonetheless questioned that person. Investigators “checked it out very thoroughly” and concluded “it was pure coincidence,” said Lt. Belinda McCastle of the Sheriff’s Department of Fayetteville, Ga., where the killings occurred. She declined to release the name of the owner of the IP address 69.120.111.23.

The Benoit case, minus that part about predicting the future, isn’t unique. There was the case of the film director and actress Adrienne Shelley, who was murdered in Greenwich Village last year. Editors at The New York Times were given a tip, and in the course of reading about her on Wikipedia (yes, newspaper editors read Wikipedia), saw that her death had already been listed. In fact, it was a full day later before the news became public knowledge, as we usually think of it.

The British newspaper The Guardian reported a similar experience in 2005, when editors there found the only confirmation of the death of the feminist writer Andrea Dworkin on Wikipedia.

Robin Hanson of George Mason University, an expert on using future markets to track public sentiment, said an e-mail exchange that these examples are hardly evidence of predicting the future. Rather, he suggested, it was “a bit newspaper-centric to say that news has not broke ‘publicly’ if it is being discussed online in rumors but has not appeared in a newspaper.” He added that “with more and more kinds of media, there are more and more intermediate levels of info availability.”

This is the crucial dividing line: between reporting on events in as close to real time as possible — which can prove jarring to society, and journalists in particular, but hardly supernatural — and predicting things around the bend.

Susan Botros of Louisville, Ky., joined www.muslimspace.com last year after receiving some “nasty e-mails about the religion” on MySpace, which she had joined to promote the Muslim faith.

Ms. Botros said she felt comfortable on muslimspace.com and delved into religious topics that non-Muslims would be unfamiliar with.

“I like it for the simple fact that I feel like I’m part of a big family,” she said. “I can post things there that if I posted on MySpace people wouldn’t understand.”

Reuven Koret, an Internet entrepreneur who founded www.shmooze.com, got the idea for the site after helping to create an African-American-focused Web site.

“I thought this seems like something good for far-flung Jewish people to explain and connect people to the state of Israel,” Mr. Koret said.

The site has about 5,000 members and allows them to delve into different aspects of the faith.

“It gives us the ability to get a little more into the diversity of Jewish content and Jewish groups,” Mr. Koret said. “People who meet at Shmooze have at least one thing in common, and that creates a feeling of intimacy.”

Caitlin Todd enjoys making friends on social networking Web sites, but is turned off by content that she believes is inappropriate on a number of popular pages.

So Caitlin, 16, meets people only on Christian social sites like www.hisholyspace.com and www.xianz.com, where profanity is prohibited, prayer is urged and content is strictly monitored.

“I use Xianz because it is a place that I can come to and have fellowship with friends. Sharing God’s word and helping others," Caitlin wrote in an e-mail message. “Xianz is like a big church!”

Numerous religious-themed social networking groups are now on the Internet, allowing users to create prayer groups, discuss movies and find potential significant others. Creators and users say the sites are family-friendly alternatives to networking sites like MySpace, which says it has more than 100,000 religious groups but also contains content that some, like Robbie Davidson, founder of Xianz.com, find offensive.

Feeling as if I had achieved a minor victory in the name of parents of teenagers everywhere, I phoned Michael Wesch, an assistant professor of cultural anthropology at Kansas State University whose research focuses on social networks, to offer him some real-life data to work with.

But although he didn’t go so far as to say he disapproved of my parenting skills, Professor Wesch reminded me that what Facebook’s younger users really are doing is exploring their identities, which they may not want to parade in front of their parents.

“Can’t I explore my identity, too?” I asked. “Why does everything fun have to be for them?”

He pointed out that there are a number of other social networks — sober, grown-up places like Linkedin.com (for making business contacts) and Care2.com (for social activists) and Webbiographies.com (for amateur genealogists) — where I could cavort without offending my daughter.

When predicting which candidate is likely to win an election, what a movie will make at the box office or how much the price of oil will fluctuate, the guesses of a crowd can be remarkably accurate.

But can crowds predict whether a book will succeed?

That is the hope of the founders of Media Predict (www.MediaPredict.com), a virtual market beginning today, and Simon & Schuster, a publisher that plans to select a book proposal based on bets placed by traders in the new market.

Media Predict is soliciting book proposals from agents and the public, and posting pages of them on the site. Traders, who are given $5,000 in fantasy cash, can buy shares based on their guess about whether a particular book proposal is likely to get a deal, or whether Touchstone Books, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, will select it as a finalist in a contest called Project Publish. If either happens within a four-month period, the value of the shares go to $100 apiece; if not, the share price falls to zero.

The site also allows traders to bet on the chances that unsigned musicians who currently top the rankings on MySpace.com, the social networking site, will get a record deal.

Media Predict is modeled after other so-called prediction markets like the Hollywood Stock Exchange, which allows traders to bet on the four-week North American box office receipts of movies, or the Iowa Electronic Markets, which allow people to bet on election results.

“Being able to predict the performance of something is key,” said Brent Stinski, founder of Media Predict. A prediction market, he said, “is a very powerful tool.”

For Simon & Schuster, the partnership is yet another attempt to gauge popular tastes. Earlier this year, the publisher teamed up with Gather.com, a social networking site, to run an “American Idol”-style contest in which voters pick a manuscript for Simon & Schuster to publish.

In the case of Media Predict, traders are not voting on the book they like best, but rather are placing bets on which they think will do well. According to Mark Gompertz, publisher of Touchstone Books, Media Predict could do for book publishing what focus groups do for soap and soda and what screening audiences do for movies.

“Since Gutenberg first printed the Bible, critics have always said publishers don’t know what they’re doing. Just throwing stuff against the wall and seeing what sticks is a crazy way to do business,” Mr. Gompertz said.

Typically, a small group of editors read a proposal and then make a decision based on gut instinct, some demographic information and a judgment about how closely the new proposal mimics other successful books. With Media Predict, Mr. Gompertz said, “many, many more eyeballs will have looked this over, and that’s what’s intriguing about this.”

Mr. Gompertz said that he and his editorial staff would winnow the proposals submitted to Media Predict down to about 50, using the highest share prices as a guide. When trading closes in September, the editors will choose five proposals that they believe have the highest potential and decide whether to offer one or more of the authors a book deal. Unlike the Gather.com contest, Touchstone is not guaranteeing any author a deal.

Christy Fletcher, an agent who has submitted a portion of a novel by Kate Shindle, a former Miss America and current Broadway actress, said that MediaPredict.com could help persuade a publisher that there was a real audience for a book.

“Some of my big successes were the books that were the most difficult to sell because they were going into places that people hadn’t gone before,” Ms. Fletcher said. In the case of Ms. Shindle, she noted, publishers have so far been reluctant to sign a deal because they are not sure that readers want to read about pageants.

“I think there will be people who look at this and see that it’s smart and realize it has commercial potential,” Ms. Shindle said. “But I don’t know — we’re just throwing it in there because we thought it might be an interesting thing to do.”

The success of the site obviously depends on attracting enough traders to make the bets meaningful. Mr. Stinski, the Media Predict founder, said that he was confident the site would lure the kind of people who already play on sites like the Hollywood Stock Exchange, which captures about 25,000 traders a day, according to Alex Costakis, managing director.

Justin Wolfers, an assistant professor of business and public policy at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania who studies prediction markets, said that if Simon & Schuster relies on the traders’ judgments to select a book, it could skew the bets themselves.

“If they say we find it really persuasive that everyone bet on book A, they’re just looking at a book that everyone bet that everyone else bet that everyone else thinks is the best book,” Mr. Wolfers said. “So you don’t end up with the wisdom of crowds, but the infinite reflection of crowds looking at crowds.”