Here's my and Andrew Rasiej's latest Politics 2.0 column, which ran in the Politico last Thursday.

If Facebook were a country, it would be the world’s seventh biggest in terms of population. In terms of the amount of attention it draws daily from its 175 million members — roughly 20 to 30 minutes on average spent updating their profiles, reading about their friends, playing games and sharing news — Facebook could easily power a midsize economy.

Here in the United States, we already know that Facebook is a meaningful platform for political engagement: from President Barack Obama on down, thousands of politicians, candidates and causes have built presences on the site, accumulating millions of supporters.

Given all the social and political activity on Facebook, some questions arise: Is Facebook a public square, like a town hall or village green? Or is it more like a private mall? Do Facebook’s members have rights? Should they have a say in the governing of the site? And how might that work?

[Yesterday, I spent an hour on the phone with Joe Green, co-founder of Project Agape, a still-partially-in-stealth start-up that is developing political social networking tools and platforms. It launched with a major new application built for Facebook Platform, called Causes. In the interview, Green talks about what he learned from his first experiment in building an online social network tuned around politics (See my March 2006 PdF article "Essembly.com: Finally, a Friendster for Politics"), his theories of online organizing, new features that Causes is going to roll out, tools Project Agape is building for MySpace and elsewhere, how to deal with privacy concerns, and how Causes differs from Change.org.]