I guess it's time to revisit some of my reservations regarding social networking sites and their usability.

My employers have been able to use social networking sites to communicate with young audiences and volunteers.  Me, being neither, I've only used Orkut with no real benefit.

Stanford has a lecture about the legal issues raised by the adoption of social networking tools in our professional lives.  The presentation can be found here.

Another factor which might merit consideration in this would be the challenge for us, as technologists, to deliver such tools.  There is an interesting article about this in the security magazine SC. . .the jump.  The article boils down to if you don't don't provide users tools (mobile phones, social networking guidelines, etc) they are going to go around security controls.

Honestly, it felt odd exempting facebook and myspace from our content filter but our voter mobilization folks claim that that was how they communicated with primarily college aged volunteers. As such, helping them do their work was the role I could play.