"I think I saw you on facebook or something."
With every new social phenomenon comes a new set of lame pick-up lines like the one above and Mark Zuckerberg's Facebook website is certainly no exception.
However, with the gates being crashed in Washington by the growing power of the netroots, the Facebook Generation could also provide another source of energy for the approaching political transformation.
In fact, I would argue that we, the 18-25 year-old college students represent the most tappable resource for Democrats in 2006 and beyond. And certainly the best way to organize this resource is the way we are organizing ourselves, the facebook.
With the birth of the Facebook website college students like myself (Boston University) are networking online at unprecedented rates (85% of students use it according to Wikipedia). The facebook allows you to list all of your classes each semeseter and easily search for everyone in that class. If you are in college or ever have been, you can imagine how much easier it is to ask for notes in a facebook message (or ten!) than face-to-face!
But more relavant to the Democrats (and thus, Kossacks) the facebook also includes tools for creating and hosting events (think MoveOn) and creating and mantaining groups.
While most political groups are tongue-in-cheek in nature ("Monica Lewinsky had more President in her than George Bush ever will," for example), there are more serious ones related to other issues (the Student Newspaper and Student Government groups for example). Using these groups, I believe there exists the potential to engage a whole lot of young liberals currently pessimistic and cynical as a result of having spent their entire mature life under Bush.
Zuckerberg, a recent college student himself (though he elected to leave Harvard with only one semester remaining to pursue facebook), has designed his website to allow for easy, effective organizing of groups and events. This makes for a perfect apparatus to engage a generation of college students who, thus far, have been defined principally for their apathy towards the political process (and now they are blaming Jon Stewart!).
I am planning to start a Daily Kos group at BU (I searched and there is not one already). I hope some college-age Kossacks will do the same at their schools.