Two thirds of the way into the campaign of the 2007 general election I have decided to check out if any party leaders have decided to set up a profile on LinkedIn, MySpace or Facebook.

Villy Søvndal decided to set up a Facebook profile on 4 November and has already managed to get 290 Facebook friends within 3 days. Surprisingly this is only a few less than Margrethe Vesterager with 327 friends who has been on Facebook for slightly longer. Both are still a long way behind  the main contesters Helle Thorning-Schmidt (2505 friends) and Anders Fogh Rasmussen (2607 friends). It would be interesting to see if the number of Facebook friends in any way will reflect the number share of seats the parties will get in the new parliament.

This week saw the launch of Google’s Open Social – a new open standard for social networks which be used on a variety of platforms from LinkedIn over Orkut to MySpace. Most of the blogs I read regularly are enthusiastic about this development:
O’Reilly Radar
Marc Andreesen
Jeff Jarvis
The Guardian
Karl Long

Now the question is of course whether Facebook has already got a size where they can stick to their own platform and take on the competition or whether platforms using the new Open Social standard will win in the long run.

Some other useful links:
http://blog.linkedin.com/
http://code.google.com/apis/opensocial/

The Danish prime minister called a general election yesterday and it made me wonder how many Danish party leaders are actually using social networking tools like LinkedIn, Facebook and MySpace.

A quick search gave the following results:

Only the two main candidates use two of the tools, Facebook and MySpace. Neither Anders Fogh Rasmussen nor Helle Thorning-Schmidt are using the more serious tool, LinkedIn. From the above it looks like Danish politicians still do their canvassing without social networking tools.

Recently, US democratic senator and presidential candidate Barack Obama consulted LinkedIn users about small businesses and entrepreneurs and connected with almost 1500 LinkedIn users who responded to the question, but it looks like this type of campaign has not yet come to Denmark.

Danah Boyd has written a very interesting essay on Viewing American class divisions through Facebook and MySpace. Basically Danah argues that Facebook are for the more affluent middle/upper class college kids where MySpace seems to attract youths from less privileged backgrounds. I wonder if there is a similar divide in any European countries?