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.”

According to a 2004 Pew study, about 82 million people in the United States, or 64 percent of U.S. Internet users, perform spiritual and religious activities online. Now, UPI reports, Beliefnet has launched a social-networking service intended to bring together religious devotees, spiritual leaders and people of all faith groups.

Does that sound like something you’d be interested in? What are the pros and cons?