Facebook has a new portal at peace.facebook.com, which tracks the friend connections made each day by people of different countries, religions and political affiliations. TechCrunch has a write up here:

“Peace.facebook.com is fairly simple at this point, with a handful of graphs and a widget that lets Facebook users share what they think of the site. The most compelling portion offers a series of graphs depicting ‘Friendships of Facebook’, which shows how many members of historically hostile groups are becoming friends on Facebook. . . . There’s also a graph that shows the results of a daily poll conducted by Facebook on whether or not World Peace is possible in the next 50 years (over 35% of Columbians think so, but only 7% of users in the US are optimistic).”

The geographic pairings include Israel-Palestine (5,788 in the last 24 hours), Albania-Serbia (9,257), India-Pakistan (7,160) and Greece-Turkey (16,368).

The religious parings include Muslim-Jewish (1,361 new friendships in the last 24 hours), Christian-atheist (57,749), Sunni-Shiite (677) and Muslim-Christian (72,935)

Politically, there have been 31,678 new U.S. conservative-liberal pairings made in the last day.

Facebook also lists some of the sample comments:

Daniela Bryan I think we need to find peace within ourselves as human beings before we can attain external peace. We are moving in the right direction and if everyone does their part starting with themselves we will get there.

Rose Rackabones very nice idea but i don’t know how it can effact those who are in heavily conflicted areas like afganistan. Every little thing counts when it comes to trying to make everyone friends, but it’s hardly us, the people who are posting on this who need to push. We already want peace. It’s the powerhungry politicians who start wars and the uneducated poor who need to be taught that violence is not a means of communication.

Charlene Barker I am very supportive of peace, especially HR808 for a Dept of Peace.

Elliot Thomas Rosen Seems like a great idea. Just curious, concerning the “Friendships on Facebook” graphs, has the data been adjusted for the natural increase in Facebook connections? I wonder what non-profit organizations could do if these metrics were made publicly available. Additionally, perhaps there are applications that groups can use to find like-minded people to organize for a common cause.

Ali Ab Peace: Life, Faith, Love.

The Facebook portal is part of a large Peace Dot directory being organized by Stanford University’s Persuasive Technology Lab:

“Many are pessimistic about peace, but our Stanford team sees a different trend. Today many good things are happening. To highlight work that increases peace, we organized “Peace Dot” and invited some partners to join us for the alpha launch in October 2009.

“The Peace Dot idea is simple: Orgs set up a subdomain at http://peace.[DomainName].com. At that page orgs share their work. At Stanford, we gather Peace Dot pages into a directory.”

Some of the other organizations in the Peace Dot directory include:

• peace.bjfogg.com
• peace.care2.com
• peace.castilleja.org
• peace.cityofmanor.org
• peace.couchsurfing.org
• peace.dalailamafoundation.org
• peace.facebook.com
• peace.khanacademy.org
• peace.iftf.org
• peace.imvu.com
• peace.kaisersantarosa.org
• peace.kissmetrics.com
• peace.learning.com
• peace.pbworks.com
• peacedot.sourceforge.net
• peace.stanford.edu