Log on to Facebook, one of the most popular social networking sites with young people, and you'll find more than 900 applications filed under "politics." One of them is a video game sponsored by the McCain campaign -- in Pork Invaders, players "help John McCain in his tireless fight against wasteful spending" by shooting down flying pigs.

Both presidential candidates have created applications that allow users to learn more about them, register to vote, find a polling place and even submit questions. McCain's seven applications have garnered about 48,000 monthly users, while Barack Obama's single application has 80,000. They're part of a Web outreach strategy that has led more than 2 million Facebook users to declare their support for Obama by "friending" him, while 750,000 have done so on MySpace (there's doubtless some overlap between the two groups). McCain has almost 590,000 Facebook friends and 189,000 on MySpace.

The question is: Will these proclamations of support translate into actual votes?

Some experts doubt that friending a candidate means being willing to stand in line on Election Day. But Adam Conner, who works in Facebook's public policy office in D.C., said that the decision to friend a candidate is akin to putting a bumper sticker on your car. "You're declaring your support. You're letting your friends and your peers know. And you're giving the campaigns a channel to reach out and communicate to someone," he said. "And I don't think that someone who takes the time to affiliate themselves with a campaign is going to go out and not vote."

Christine Williams, a professor of government at Bentley University in Massachusetts, found evidence that candidates' penetration of social networks correlated most strongly with their support among young voters, a demographic that has been on the rise for the last several elections. More than 20 million Americans under 30 cast ballots in 2004, according to the Center For Information And Research On Civic Learning And Engagement, up 4.3 million from 2000 and a 26 percent increase in turnout. Record numbers [PDF] of young people voted in the 2008 primary season, and many are projecting that turnout among the 18-to-29-year-old demographic this November could reach levels not seen since the 1970s.

Morley Winograd and Michael Hais, authors of Millennial Makeover: MySpace, YouTube, And The Future Of American Politics, attribute this shift to two causes. The first is the rise of a "dynamic" generation -- the millenials, who grew up in the 1990s and 2000s. Hais said that millenials, about 40 percent of whom are eligible to vote in this election, are "group-oriented, very activist, very focused on changing and fixing things by working together" and consider voting "an absolute necessity." The second factor is the concurrent rise of a new communication technology -- social networks, through which candidates can reach this Web-savvy generation.

"Usually young people don't really feel that they're a targeted demographic and that politicians are really reaching out to them or really care about their issues," says Stephanie Young, spokeswoman for Rock the Vote, a group dedicated to registering young voters. But this year, candidates "have been invading their world through technology, through the Internet, and making it really easy for young people to feel like they're a part of the campaign and that they matter."

But what also makes social networks different from previous media -- television and radio in particular -- is that it can be a dialogue rather than a monologue. Candidates can disseminate their message to potential supporters, but users can also communicate with one another without any control from a central authority.

Hais and Winograd cite Obama's MyBarackObama.com -- designed by one of the founders of Facebook, Chris Hughes, whom the Obama campaign has brought on to run its new-media strategy -- as the most effective example of social network campaigning this election cycle. The site, Winograd said, "does not look like a typical campaign Web site. It's not an electronic brochure with an appeal for funds.... It is instead a place to interact with your friends to fill out a profile so people can discover if they have something in common with you and communicate directly with you."

The resulting group-oriented activity, Winograd explains, "drives a much higher level of involvement and commitment by people who get involved in that two-way dialogue. And that generates two wonderful byproducts," he said. "One is a lot of money and the other is a great deal of enthusiastic organizers to go out offline... and make phone calls and knock on doors and other things that campaigns need done, which has always been difficult to recruit for."

"At the end of the day, it's about taking volunteers and taking people online and translating that online energy to offline purposes," said Michael Palmer, McCain's e-campaign director. "We have a grassroots field organization out there, so one of the most obvious things is that you allow those people who made initial contact with you through electronic medium, allow your ground operation to get in touch with them and put them to work."

Not everyone agrees that social networking will prove to be an effective way to get young voters to the polls. David Nickerson, assistant professor of political science at the University of Notre Dame, argued that the type of people who are using social networks for political purposes are "likely to reside in a social network where most people are likely to vote" anyway. "So you are preaching to the converted, and you can't get people to vote."

But one effort that does seem to be making measurable progress already is online voter registration. Rock the Vote has already registered nearly 2.3 million new voters this election cycle, compared with 1.4 million in 2004, primarily through online and mobile outreach efforts. Nearly 50,000 new voters have filed their paperwork through Facebook. And MySpace is partnering with groups such as Declare Yourself, Rock the Vote, College Republicans and the National Constitution Center to sponsor the Ultimate College Bowl, a competition to see which university can register the most students. (The winning school will get to host a free Death Cab For Cutie concert on campus.)

Lee Brenner, political director for MySpace, predicts that not only the Obama and McCain campaigns, but also third-party groups will use social networking sites to remind young people to vote early, send in absentee ballots and get to the polls on Election Day, helping to drive up turnout.

This combination of an engaged electorate and new technology suggests that 2008 "absolutely will be the year of the youth vote," according to Winograd. But the election will also mark a turning point in the way that future campaigns choose to reach out to voters of all ages. "You'll no longer have the Internet simply being an afterthought," Brenner predicts. "It's going to be a major part of the strategy of every campaign from president down to student body president going forward."