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.