After reading a story in Newsweek about how Facebook is taking over the world, I decided to try to catch up with this social networking web site. Actually I’ve had an account for a while, but that was inspired solely by a desire to check out who my children’s friends are. Now I want to see what Facebook can do for me and my campaign.
In case you don’t know, www.facebook.com was started as a way for students at the same college to meet and get to know each other faster. For a long time, you had to have a college-based e-mail address to sign up. Recently, however, the service opened the doors to anybody and non-college students are now the majority of new members, although the overall demographic still skews fairly young. (By the way the service is absolutely free.)
As an example, when I had Facebook check out the 195 e-mail addresses in my contact list, it only found 14 current members of Facebook, and most of those were either college students or staff. Still I sent a spam blast out to all of those people inviting them to join, so that may increase. (Most of the names were e-mail addresses I gathered over the summer of local Republicans, so that is probably not an accurate measure of Facebook’s overall market penetration.)
I’m a newbie at this, of course, so don’t expect great things from my site, but if you are a member I would be happy to be your friend! A candidate needs all the friends he can get! If you are a member, you can check out my face here!
