With the youth vote skyrocketing, candidates are eagerly seeking connection points with 18-30 year-olds. Social networks like Facebook, MySpace, and others are emerging as the best connection point and proving to be a powerful tool for youth votes in the Presidential elections.

Every front running candidate today has made efforts to engage the social networking crowd—some candidates jumping in faster than others.

Until the beginning of this year, Clinton’s interest in the Facebook vote was minimal. However, when Obama drew 57% of the 18-30 year-old vote in Iowa (compared to her 11%) it sparked her interest. She now proudly answers questions from avid Facebookers on her website and boasts an impressive Facebook page herself.

Almost every candidate now has the Facebook logo easily accessible on their website, linking supporters to their pages. More than 1 million “Facebookers” have added the “US Politics” Application. And just in case anyone is counting Facebook “friends”, the numbers are growing every minute. This Saturday in the span of 7 hours, Obama gained more than 6,000 Facebook supporters (from 454,108 to 460,643, up from 381,179 the night of Super Tuesday). Clinton has 106,949 and Ron Paul, John McCain, and Mike Huckabee follow with 83,558, 53,917, and 51,809 respectively.

Chrissy Faessen from Rock the Vote told WoW, “New technology has absolutely affected and influenced the way youth voters engage politics.” She cited social networking as well as mobile marketing (text message reminders and updates) as two key strategies changing the rules of the game for the 2008 election.

Social networks have now gone beyond support groups and debate pages. Viewers from all over the U.S. tuned in to the MySpace/MTV Presidential dialogue series and ABC/Facebook Presidential debates recently, both boasting live Webcasts and instant feedback from viewers. Faessen asserts that “this new generation is more engaged than ever.”

While naysayers may call Facebook.com a distraction for college students, researchers are forging the popular online social network into a new arena for an old question: How do people connect?

By studying the online networking patterns of 1,700 college juniors at an East Coast school (unidentified to preserve the integrity of the project), researchers from Harvard and the University of California, Los Angeles, are testing the connection between personal taste and friendship choices. Harvard researcher and associate professor of sociology Jason Kaufman asks, “Do birds of a feather flock together, or do you become more like your friends?”

For researchers, Facebook is a microcosm of larger patterns in human relationships, particularly among young people. This microcosm - with 58 million active users – is currently the sixth-most visited site on the web and continues to grow.

Harvard and UCLA researchers are just one example of many recent academic forages into an otherwise un-academic virtual world. Facebook-oriented research has been conducted or is currently ongoing at institutions like University of Indiana, Northwestern, University of Texas, PennState, and Michigan State University.

This research raises questions about student privacy as well as issues of what is or is not a suitable arena for academic research. Some stricter schools such as Indiana University will not approve research until scholars obtain permission from individuals or the social networking organization itself.

Stephen Salyers, assistant professor of communication at The Kings College and a two-year member of Facebook, told WoW the online community can make the lines between professor and student “a little blurry.” Salyers sees both pros and cons in Facebook research, but emphasizes the inherent problems of trying to clinically dissect a social medium: “It’s completely dependent on what a person offers or creates for their electronic image. … You have to read it in a very sophisticated way.”

The unstoppable march of technology into the utopian future of global civilization is no match for the banality of human depravity.  Not the kind of depravity that maims babies and burns villages.  But the kind that maims the conscience and burns decency.  This is why I like technology.  The better and more impressive it gets, the more thorough and far-reaching and evident seems the fallen nature of mankind.   

Warning: The link that inspired this post, which has something to do with what one mother is doing on Facebook, is vulgar, and also terribly dull and pedestrian.

News broke last week that GodTube, a free video-sharing Web site that rode YouTube’s coattails to popularity, set a record even its namesake never held: It was the Internet’s fastest-growing site in August. Sources pegged the number of unique visitors between 1.7 million and 5 million, an almost 1,000 percent growth since it started Aug. 8.

Yes, there has been Conservapedia, the Wikipedia alternative, and Famster and MyChurch, Christian spin-offs of Facebook and MySpace. But so far, this is the most successful Christian foray into “Web 2.0″ — a term for the outburst of online communities, social-networking sites and wikis that are remaking the Internet.

Chris Wyatt, GodTube’s CEO, said he hopes GodTube will help reverse the American church’s eroding importance. But when Fox News asked if GodTube is a “fair swap” for church, Wyatt responded, “We’re not a substitute for church. We’re just there for the millions of individuals who are seeking a new faith experience online.”

Early GodTube reviews were swift and swordlike. Critics like George Simpson are giving the site the third-degree. True, many videos are silly. (In one, apologist Ray Comfort debunks evolution using his famous banana example, pointing to evolution’s “non-slip surface.”)

Other Internet observers have wondered why it took Christians — who created alternative phonebooks, eHarmony and a plethora of faith-centered radio and TV stations and magazines — this long to capitalize on Web 2.0.

“Sure, denominations and sects have their own . . . web resources — some even run dynamic, regularly updated web portals,” wrote Barry Summerlin, a contributor to BloggingStocks. “But your web search for religion will mostly yield a lot of domain squatting . . . and last century’s web design.”

Summerlin points to some interesting data: While the number of Google search entries for “God” and “Jesus” barely eclipses those for “Britney Spears” in the past three years, the term “church” has routinely bested all three.