(This story was originally published on AlterNet and is crossposted with the permission of the excellent folks over there. -- Nancy)

As an organizing tool, Facebook has had a couple of ugly weeks of late. Students at Michigan State University recently used Facebook to revive Cedar Fest, an old campus tradition that had been outlawed by local officials in the late 1980s after it frequently escalated from a party into something more akin to a riot. This time around, after violence ensued, East Lansing police officials vowed to hold those Facebook users accountable. News headlines ran along the lines of "Facebook: Tool for Chaos?" and the social-networking site was demonized as a means for the rabble to wreak havoc. But it's only right to hold up the recent commotion in south-central Michigan against other Facebook-fueled collective action. Facebook is revolutionizing the way collective political and social actions are organized today, blowing the doors off old models of how volunteer lists are amassed, funds raised, and messages honed and delivered.

[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.]