Yesterday Facebook announced on its blog that its more than 65 million users now have the ability to better define their political views by choosing the "Political Party" that they support.

In other words, whereas before folks like me had to choose either "Conservative" or "Libertarian" to identify my political views, I can now choose the political party I represent instead, e.g., Republican Party. Now, it's important to note that your choices are not limited to Facebook's pre-loaded Party options as I was still able to write in "Conservative" and "Libertarian" and avoid Facebook's suggestion to support the "Conservative Party - Norway" or the "Libertarian Party - United States."

Here's a quick before and after of my profile:

While my friends Michael Whitney and Nancy Scola argue that this is a bad move (and make some very good points that I hope the Facebook team notices), I disagree. And I do so both as a "Republican" who supports the "Republican Party" and as a small-businessman who uses Facebook to better target a message for my clients.

First, for me personally, I've always been an "establishment" guy so I'm proud to support the Republican Party. I've always wanted to label myself as a Republican who supports the Republican Party and now I'm able to do so. Finally.

Second, as someone who utilizes the Facebook advertising tools, this change will allow me to better target a message to those folks who raise their hands proactively as Republicans who support the Republican Party.

The bottom-line is that No change at Facebook will go unnoticed because the site impacts every facet of our lives, and the lively discussion on both sides of the aisle is a credit to that. The Facebook team should listen to the smart people raising good points but I believe that this is a step in the right direction.

Thoughts?

From Mashable:

Facebook had already shared its plans to help you clean up your now-cluttered profile, thanks to all those applications, and today the new feature has arrived. A new option for an extended profile basically offers a “page 2″ of sorts, so visitors to your profile can choose to see all those extra, bottom rung applications if they want to. Instead of seeing an ongoing stream of applications on your profile, they’ll now see a truncated version, with the option to see more.

From the looks of it, Facebook will detect which applications display at the bottom of your profile. You can select to move one or all of these apps to your extended profile. This can be edited at any time, in case you tire of another application that’s showing on your profile. A link on your profile will let you view your extended profile as well.

I've been watching the MySpaceification of Facebook for a while now, and shaking my head the whole time. It's proven to me very clearly that a lot of people, simply put, have no taste.

From a Facebook user's perspective this is great news, more control over my own profile to highlight what content I care about.

But from the perspective of someone who builds applications, this makes my life that much more difficult. Having your application shunted to the bottom/second page of a profile reduces its visibility exponentially.

But all is not lost, you just have to build an App that's cool and engaging enough that a user will want to place it on their profile's mainpage.

Following in the deep footprints of YouTube-CNN, MySpace-MTV, and 10Questions.com-NY Times Editorial Board, Facebook has partnered with media partner ABC News and have announced a series of debates to take place in January before the New Hampshire primary.

Very few details are known about the debate(s) including format and whether facebook will use its video app to encourage user-generated questions from its massive community for the candidates (if they participate), but here's what we do know:

ABC News and Facebook announced this morning that they will join forces during the presidential campaign -- and that one of their first major ventures will be back-to-back debates three days before the New Hampshire primary.

The partnership will combine the technology of the ubiquitous social networking site with ABC's coverage, which will be directly posted to Facebook, whose 55 million members will soon be able to discuss the campaign through a new Debate Groups tool accessed by putting "U.S. Politics" in the search field.

The collaboration will be in play for the Jan. 5 debates being sponsored by ABC and WMUR at St. Anselm College in Manchester.

"The goal is to extend the debate from being a one-hour session that happens on television to a dialogue that can take place before, after, and now during the debate between voters," Dan Rose, Facebook's vice president of business development, told ABC News.com.

The candidates have pages on Facebook, seeking support among younger voters who typically show up in smaller numbers on election day.

Given CNN's debacle of the GOP's YouTube debate, I doubt any Republican campaign will be jumping up and down to participate (save the lower-tier candidates), unless Facebook and ABC News enforce some sort of content-balance.

We look forward to watching this develop over the next month or so.

(My only hope is that I don't receive a press release announcing a debate being offered by the fictional Friendster-[insert declining media partner here] partnership.)

New changes at facebook were announced today.

Today, Facebook Ads launched with three parts: a way for businesses to build pages on Facebook to connect with their audiences; an ad system that facilitates the spread of brand messages virally through Facebook Social Ads™; and an interface to gather insights into people’s activity on Facebook that marketers care about.

Politicians and facebook have been around for a while now and a politician on facebook is a strange animal. While they are people they don’t mess with their profiles. With the advent of new facebook pages a politician can now fit in a little better.

So far Barack Obama has the first facebook page that I have found

The new pages look like a profile/group hybrid. They are designed for companies to have a facebook presence and gather fans, the ability to do a mass mailing to all your fans, as well as way to integrate targeted facebook ads.For a politician on a grand scale i.e. presidential elections this will have an impact but on a smaller local scale I think pages will have a tremendous effect.A county commissioner can set up a facebook page, gather supporter and also run targeted facebook ads to just the conservatives in his town above the age of 18. Think google ads combined with a facebook page for your politician/business with targeting down to, age, sex, region, keywords etc.To bad it was released after the Nov 6th election cycle, it would have been fun to test out.

Those are my half formed thoughts after messing with pages for an hour so put on your thinking caps and discuss how this can help us techrepublicans.

IMHO - it's going to be BIG

Patrick Ruffini has an important blog post up as part of his dive in to facebook demographics using the Flyers Pro advertising tool. This is the first time I've seen a solid look at the demographics associated with American users.

Essentially, the Flyers Pro tool lets anyone -- regardless of intent to buy advertising -- poke around and identify an advertising universe based on things like location, gender, age, current education status, political views, keywords, and relationship status.

Patrick's spreadsheet of the data is thorough and I'd urge you to check it out.

Further, he asks for users to help him add more data to the project by leaving research findings in the comments of his post. Crowd-sourcing at its finest. I've made my contribution with these three:

Apple Computers
Total Users: 3,540
Liberal: 1,060
Moderate: 540
Conservative: 520

Broken Social Scene (Music: Indie/Canadian)
Total Users: 52,200
Liberal: 21,800
Moderate: 5,200
Conservative: 1,540

Guns
Total Users: 29,100
Liberal: 3,560
Moderate: 3,880
Conservative: 8,320

Since the advertising tool has been made public it's being used widely by bloggers to help find interesting information. In fact, just this past week, Soren Dayton of EyeOn08 and Redstate, sent around a link to Stephen Taylor's blog where Stephen has started to break down data for conservatives and the media in Canada. Over in the UK, my friend Samuel Coates who helps run the hub, Conservative Home (among many others), has used the application to help identify the political leanings/bias of the BBC.

Patrick has also identified a possible flaw in the advertising engine in that it limits your political views search to "Conservative," "Moderate," or "Liberal," excluding identifiers like "Libertarian" and "Other," which are both available political views on a profile. I'd also add that there might be instances where you'd only want to target the "Very Conservative" universe which is not an option.

I also found another area for possible improvement in the advertising engine during the "Apple Computers" search example (which helps explain the small universe). The problem is that the tool limits keyword searches with what appears to be a facebook-selected, pre-loaded list of terms. The problem of course is that for those Mac users who might be inclined to list their computer preference as an interest, including this one, we don't list an "Apple Computer," but rather something more personal like "My MacBook Pro."

It would be helpful if you could add as many terms as you want to help make the largest possible universe regardless of which term someone uses to describe their interest. In the "guns" example, I'd also like to find people who list terms like "Second Amendment," "2nd Amendment," "NRA," "National Rifle Association," "Concealed carry," etc. Those individuals are clearly people I might want to send a particular message.

The power of this tool is perhaps just now being realized by advertisers and the political world. However, I think Patrick's on to something when he asks, "Could Facebook be the greatest microtargeting engine ever built?" It's certainly heading in that direction.

From the press release:

Facebook® and Microsoft Corp. today announced that Microsoft will take a $240 million equity stake in Facebook's next round of financing at a $15 billion valuation, and the companies will expand their existing advertising partnership. Under the expanded strategic alliance, Microsoft will be the exclusive third-party advertising platform partner for Facebook, and will begin to sell advertising for Facebook internationally in addition to the United States.

$15 billion valuation. Wow.

And politicians still say "social networks" are just for kids, eh?

Another socnet has just launched - The Right-Wing Facebook, it's a parody site sponsored by the monster liberal organization, People for the American Way. The site has profiles for all the Republican presidential candidates and links to their "friends" in the Conservative movement like Dr. Dobson and Gary Bauer. As you can guess, the profiles aren't very flattering.

It's obvious that PFAW has put a lot of thought and time into this parody site, and I have to give a lot of credit to the guys who put this together - it's good. The profiles are clever and it's a great way to disseminate all of the opposition research and hits that the liberals have collected on the Republican candidates.

So... what conservative organization is going to create The Left-Wing Facebook?

(H/T Wonkette)

Cross-Posted to DAG.

Last night, Unity08 sent an alert explaining the differences between Facebook, YouTube, Flickr and Myspace and descriping the concept of social networking.

The power of social networking is quite amazing. In a very short amount of time, you can be virtually connected with millions of people. At Unity08, we use our social network profiles to help us connect with others that are interested in learning more about us.

Please take 10 minutes this week to check out (and/or join) our social networks!

If you are already part of the social networks below, then make sure you add us as a "friend" or that you subscribe to our channel. If you are not on the networks below, please consider joining or subscribing.

YouTube allows you to upload, view and share video clips.
Subscribe to our video channel now!

Flickr is a photo sharing web site.
Join our flickr group now!

Facebook: Join or sign in, then search for "Unity08" to find our application.
Click here to join or sign in to Facebook!

MySpace is an interactive network of friends.
Click here to add Unity08 as a friend on MySpace!

How does this help us? By joining a social network and adding us as a friend or subscribing to a group or channel, you help us to be seen by more people. Joining our network makes it easy for you to meet other Unity08 members and to pass along our profile to your friends!

We'll see you online!

At first I thought that the alert was a waste of time. Why do users need to be educated about social networks? Aren't we already on them? Then Facebook statistics came to mind.

Social networking isn't for kids anymore. According to Facebook, by the end of 2007, Facebook will be up to 60 million users, and 75% will be out of college. With 65% of people 50-64 going online, and 32% of the 65+ crowd venturing onto the web, it's worth recruiting them. The adoption curve is moving toward older audiences, and we need to change perceptions that web stuff is for crazy college students.

The British Telegraph is reporting that a revolt organized on Facebook has caused a giant bank to roll back student fees.

If you see Facebook as a silver bullet with the key to all future political or policy success, you need new glasses. If you are looking for a competitive advantage, however, and are truly committed to doing whatever it takes to make your message heard, read on.

Behind the Buzz

Facebook is that little college experiment from Harvard student Mark Zuckerberg that now has over 32 million users (August 2007). Originally built for high school and college students, they opened the platform to everyone in September 2006. Over the past year, Facebook has experienced growth of over 2400 percent, taking over the Internet faster than Alexander the Great conquered ancient Persia.

Here are some more statistics to blow your mind:

• More than 100,000 new registrations per day since Jan. 2007
• An average of 3 percent weekly growth since Jan. 2007
• More than half of Facebook users are outside of college
• The fastest growing demographic is those 25 years old and older
• Sixth-most trafficked site in the United States
• More than 40 billion page views per month in May 2007
• More than half of active users return daily
• People spend an average of 20 minutes on the site daily

In case the natural conclusion wasn't already formed in your mind, we'll say it here: Facebook is huge. And conservatives need to pay attention.

Top 10 Facebook Tips

Primarily, this is not the place to remind people to vote. This is not the place to post press releases. This is not the place to share the same information that these same people can get elsewhere. Conservative groups can not just create a Facebook profile and then walk away.

Those are basic uses of Facebook that we should engage in, but only if we're committed to engaging with Facebook users at a higher level, with activities like:

1. Create a group, then keeping it updated with new content.
2. Message supporters with exclusive information about your activities.
3. Recruit volunteers for campaign events and activities.
4. Recruit online activists to comment on blogs and vote on online polls.
5. Solicit feedback, as scary as this may be. If you have a group, have a discussion board. If you get comments and feedback, write back (an intern can do this so long as your supporters know SOMEONE is listening).
6. Offer an exclusive event, just via Facebook events, for your supporters. This drives traffic and increases the level of activity your supporters are willing to offer.
7. Proactively seek out similar groups and users. Engage with them on discussion boards and through messaging. Resist self-promotion on users' walls. No one likes a sales pitch on their wall.
8. Upload video, links, photos and more.
9. Run banner advertising on the site, targeted at younger voters (even if your target audience isn't younger, many older Facebook users are still young at heart).
10. List your campaign in the Causes application so users can donate directly from Facebook.

And finally (call this a Bonus tip), consider building a Facebook application. It's easier than it sounds, and will allow your supporters to add your content directly to their profile pages. Facebook apps are huge right now (there are over 2,500) because they give users the ability to express their personality and interests in new, unique ways. They also give you the flexibility to add new content and functionality right into your supporters' profiles.

Interested in learning more? There are a lot of web companies out there who can help build your Facebook strategy as well. It's not a silver bullet, but it is a powerful weapon to give you a competitive advantage.

And who doesn't want that?

[Note: Thanks to Jeremiah Owyang of PodTech.net for his Facebook research and writing which have influenced many of these tips.]