MySpace.com wants you to "Declare Yourself."
The social-networking Web site, which boasts more than 114 million users, joined its competitor Facebook.com in trying to increase voter awareness by setting up its own voter-registration page last week.
The new feature of MySpace allows users to enter their zip code and personal information, after which they receive a registration form to print and send to local election officials.
MySpace will be posting "Register to Vote" advertisements on its Web site over the next month, and users can invite their friends to register through the site as well.
MySpace's efforts to increase voter turnout come nearly a month after Facebook started its own political service, through which politicians can set up their own profiles and users can identify the candidates and issues they support.
Julie Barko Germany, deputy director of George Washington University's Institute for Politics, Democracy and the Internet, said the introduction of social-networking sites into politics should not be a surprise considering the number of companies trying to tap into the sites' millions of users.
"When you see all the money people are investing to try to get into MySpace, it makes sense [that] politicians would try to reach that base as well," Germany said.
Penn Leads the Vote President and College senior Bren Darrow said MySpace's initiative can only help prospective voters, adding that efforts on campus to register voters might reduce its impact at Penn.
"It's a great thing because they're reaching out to people who wouldn't already be immersed in this kind of information," he said. "But I think on our campus we have people who are working so hard that [MySpace] might not be that necessary."
Germany also cautioned that if MySpace and Facebook merely introduce the service, it will not be enough to attract prospective voters.
The Web sites must follow up on their efforts to truly be effective, she said.
"I notice quite a few candidates put up a profile on MySpace with nothing really on it and expect magical things to happen, but it won't happen," Germany said. "You really have to cultivate people. That's what these sites are for. They can be particularly effective if [used] the right way, but putting something up is just a Band-Aid."
MySpace is providing the new service in a partnership with Declare Yourself, a national nonpartisan youth voting campaign created in 2004.
