1. More than 250 million people use Facebook Connect every month

   There was a lot of discussion a few years ago about the portability of the social graph, your own network of contacts and personal information. Google, Facebook, Twitter … every new system that arrived on the scene had it’s own picture of your social connections. Initiatives like OpenID came into being to try to bridge those gaps across systems, but today many sites offer access to multiple authentication schemes and let their members decide which login to use. This can present some issues for both developers and users, of course, but it is usually a win for everyone to lower the barrier to entry for more people by refusing to commit to one silo. The fact that a quarter billion people leverage the Facebook authentication each month speaks volumes about the rest of the social graph ecosystem, too.

2. A lot happens on Facebook

   That’s an understatement. During the average 20-minute period in 2010, there were (among other things) 1.5 million wall posts. To put that in perspective: The great novel War and Peace is 560,000 words long. Assuming the average wall post is 15 words, that’s 127.5 Tolstoy novels worth of content every hour. The largest museum in the world—the State Hermitage Museum in Russia—has 639,000 paintings and graphic art works, just 24 percent of the number of photos uploaded to Facebook every twenty minutes. There are 14 million messages and comments exchanged on Facebook each hour, the equivalent of almost two-thirds of the volume of USPS mail. A lot happens on Facebook.

3. Twitter biographies increased to 69 percent

   From December 2009 to December 2010, users with a biography listed on Twitter increased from 31 percent to 69 percent. This is a significant change for two key reasons. First, it is a clear sign of growth in fluency using the microblogging platform. Informal studies have shown that people are more likely to trust you (and therefore follow you) if you have a full profile, especially a descriptive personal bio. Second, even if only to self-disclose who you are in a short paragraph, this is a significant behavioral shift from private to public action. There is still a large percentage of registrations who don’t use the service, but for those who do this is a big win for transparency and connection.

4. Friday at 4p EASTERN is the most retweetable time each week

   HubSpot’s Dan Zarella has invested a great deal of time in tracking the behaviors of link sharing in social media. His work typically looks at the aggregate picture, however, to show in chart form why it is better to craft your viral-friendly microcontent on Friday or Saturday afternoon, instead of Monday morning. While you can learn a lot by looking at the aggregate (e.g., Twitscoop), most Twitter networks are local in nature, reflecting existing offline and geographic connections. 4p Friday may be a great statistical time to get a retweet, but it may not be your best target for your audience. Ultimately, success in getting others to rely on you as an information source is tied most strongly to the relationships and trust you cultivate.

5. 4 percent of adults on the Internet use location-based services

   The current interest in place-based community started in earnest with Dodgeball, a service aimed at creating awareness in major metropolitan areas about who was in the same vicinity you were. Launched in 2003 as a thesis project in an world without smart phones, Dodgeball was later bought (2005) and then scrapped (2009) by Google. A month later, the same team launched Foursquare as a replacement, this time with a growing user base armed with iPhones, Blackberries, and Androids. Last December, the company reported 6 million users and information from over 380 million check-ins. With other services (Gowalla, Loopt, Google Latitude, Facebook Places) in this space, this 4 percent stat ought to grow significantly as companies learn to leverage the local context.

Although Kucinich is politically the closest alignment with me, some of the other dimensions—such as marital history—may have pushed him further away than the other Democrats. My closest match is 78-year-old Mike Gravel, who matched up well with my profile and holds many of the same beliefs as Kucinich. The recommendation prompted me to check out his site, where I learned the former Senator from Alaska has a presence in Second Life.

Overall, the site is a clean design and appears to go deeper than many of the similar political tools popping up as the countdown to electing a new President ticks closer to the one-year mark. Some criticize the inside-the-box use of public positions as the basis of matching candidates, but the information complexity and interactions involved with configuring one’s own profile is pretty impressive. The interactive features act like a card sort, allowing you to drag key issues in four broad categories into a spatial arrangement of relative importance. The configuration took a couple minutes to complete and produced a simple visualization showing the candidates of highest relevance.

Connect2Elect has a drag-n-drop tool to prioritize political issues.

Where the criticism holds up is in how Connect2Elect makes use of that data to generate the outcome and in the top-down nature of possible tags.

The push pin metaphor used in the main visualization works only as much as one can aggregate all of the issues into a single measure of distance from your position. I don’t think that is practical. While Connect2Elect does incorporate another dimension in the display—placing a pin in a particular quadrant to show where each candidate most aligned with one of the four sections of your issue tags—the algorithm seems to overly simplify all of the profile depth.

There are some inherent constraints on the candidate side about what can be compared. This is an information accessibility issue, most likely, and not necessarily a deliberate choice of Neighborhood America and introNetworks, the creators of the site. It would be interesting to be able to compile richer candidate profiles through their history of public service. This could include impact on constituents, performance in lower offices, and legislative history.

Perhaps there is a potential marriage with a site like Fantasy Congress, which looks a a wide range of metrics in measuring political success to power their online games. The issue tags, too, are merely a reflection of populist issues and not generated by grassroots and local interests. Open-ended folksonomies, older issues of concern (like flag burning amendments), and criteria such as consistency would enhance the match engine. The use of folksonomies, in particular, and local issues are important in facilitating discovery that crosses standard party lines. If the only options are binary tags associated with an abstracted party platform, then the visualized results will inherently reflect that division.

Dennis Kucinich isn’t my candidate of choice, according to Connect2Elect