Everyone knows what you did last summer. In spite of a small victory for privacy last month, Facebook's policies still raise major privacy questions -- and young people may be developing an entirely new conception of privacy online.

More on young voters in 2008; lost votes in California?; Ben Smith shares the labor and the smarts; Real Clear Politics earns some kudos; Matt Stoller reinvents campaign finance reform; Patrick Leahy wants the Founding Fathers online; what went wrong for Mitt Romney; McCain aide shares some secrets; GOP "money-bomb" bombs; Josh reports from Italy; our favorite videos; and some reality checks to end the week.

So, this afternoon I got an email reading, "Howard Dean sent you a message on Facebook." (This is after I decided to accept his friend invitation yesterday.) Well, it wasn't really from Dean. What I did get was an email from the person who is paid to "be" Howard Dean on Facebook, or rather, one of the staffers behind his profile, Stephanie Taylor, the managing editor of Democrats.org. I wish I could say I was disappointed to not hear directly from the Governor, but this is what I expected. Let's parse what she wrote...

Today, I got a friend request on Facebook from Howard Dean, and I decided to break my own rule on accepting such requests from politicians, because I wonder how he's going to use Facebook...and if he'll now respond to my email to him.

The Web on the Candidates

James Kotecki has a great video analysis of Rudy Giuliani's reluctance to take advantage of the social web (Jeff Jarvis isn't so diplomatic, and calls Rudy a "control freak"). James points out that, despite having virtually no presence on YouTube (except for that drag-queen video), Rudy still tops most polls. Does that prove that YouTube doesn't matter? Of course not. Candidates need to use video to show their real side and to insulate themselves from attacks. "The longer Mayor Giuliani stays atop the polls, the more likely it is that other videos, potentially much more damaging than his queen-for-a-day appearance, will show up as well... viewers will be more likely to forgive a candidate's YouTube transgressions if they've been using YouTube to show themselves as a real person," Kotecki says.

After reading about danah boyd's fantastic essay about class differences on Facebook and MySpace, Eyeon08 was struck by the idea that "those with more education tend to be on Facebook while those in the margins of nearly every aspect of our culture can be found on MySpace." He decided to compare Barack Obama's numbers on the two sites (using our charts, of course). He found that Obama is doing better than Hillary Clinton "among the educated rich kids," i.e., on Facebook. Does this mean anything? Who knows, though it should be noted that before Obama's campaign took over Joe Anthony's volunteer-created MySpace profile, Obama held a similar lead on MySpace.

[This morning, danah boyd gave a great presentation on how politicians are failing to understand the social dynamics of online social networks. She's posted the "rough unedited crib of the actual talk" on her website, and we're pleased that she's given us permission to post it here as well. The editors.]

Think about the publics that you know, the publics where politics occur. Gatherings like this... conference halls, shopping malls, political rallies, etc. How do politics take place in these spaces? Obviously, speeches are a part of it, but there's more that happens in these publics. At the very simplest level, there's a lot of shaking hands with everyday people. Ideally, there's a lot of listening to people's stories... Always, there's presence. Presence has been a critical component of political discourse because it allows people to connect to and relate with politicians. Through shared presence, politicians are made "real."

It's been a busy week in the 2008 presidential campaign--Hillary Clinton launched her online "conversation" (see David Weinberger's spot-on critique) and went to Iowa; John Edwards also did an online video web-chat that he calls a "live online discussion"; Barack Obama laid low and let the explosive growth of one unofficial Facebook group (now at more than 158,000 members) speak for him; and Bill Richardson formally announced his campaign launch.

Not surprisingly, the Democratic candidate who showed the most growth in online grassroots support, as measured by trends in the number of friends they have on their MySpace page and in incoming blog posts to their campaign site was Richardson, whose MySpace numbers were up a whopping 61,100% and blog posts up 285.8%. Of course, those numbers have to be put into context. A week ago, Richardson had only one friend on MySpace; as of last night (Sunday, January 28), he had 611. His incoming blog link tally, as measured by Technorati, jumped from an anemic 92 to a still feeble 355. But, hey, you have to start somewhere.

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