Colbert Quickly Colonizes Facebook: Million plus in Facebook's fastest-growing political group ever

[DeepModem Mom]

NYT: The Colbert Nation Quickly Colonizes Facebook
By BRIAN STELTER
Published: October 29, 2007

Stephen Colbert’s presidential candidacy may be phony, but his supporters are very real.

Late on Oct. 16, immediately after the comedian declared his intentions on his satirical news show “The Colbert Report,” supportive groups began to form on the social networking site Facebook. One of them — a group created by Raj Vachhani and titled “1,000,000 Strong for Stephen T Colbert” — has grown to more than a million members in just over a week, making it the most popular political group on Facebook by far.

If Mr. Colbert does manage to get on the primary ballot in South Carolina, Mr. Vachhani said he would definitely cast a vote for the comedian — if he could. But Mr. Vachhani is only 16 years old. A high school student in Montgomery, Ala., he created the group after watching Mr. Colbert’s televised announcement. He said he wanted to approximate the population of Mr. Colbert’s online supporters and find out what other fans thought of the satirist’s candidacy.

He didn’t expect the excitement about Mr. Colbert’s candidacy to place a strain on Facebook’s server capacity. But the sheer volume of group participants — an average of 83 new members a minute for eight straight days — forced the Web site to take the group offline temporarily.

In an e-mail interview, Mr. Vachhani expressed disbelief at the group’s explosive online growth. “What amazed me the most was how Obama’s 1 Million Strong Group took more than 8 months to get about 380,000 members, but Colbert’s 1 Million Strong Group took less than a week to get 750,000 members,” he wrote in an e-mail message Wednesday.

By Sunday, the group had grown to more than 1.13 million, making it easily the fastest-growing political group in Facebook’s four-year history....

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/29/business/media/29colbert.html?ref=politics