Al Gore Discovers an Inconvenient Truth About Facebook

Our international readers may not realize that former U.S. Vice President-turned-environmental-activist Al Gore is at once laughed at and lauded for claiming to have "created the Internet" — a gem of a sound bite, especially when taken out of context. Well, he may want to take it back. If this screenshot is any indication, he'd have been better off inventing "Web 2.0"; at least then, he might be able to conjure up a Facebook app that could convince the American public that he's not running for President in '08. (Besides, this particular application, a news aggregator, hasn't exactly been kind with the headlines.)

Poor Al. Not only has he endured the pain of winning the popular vote, then losing the 2000 presidential election in a landmark court case — now this?

Recently, Wired Magazine editor — and bestselling author of The Long Tail — Chris Anderson elaborated on Tim O'Reilly's Facebook application research, which found that "87% of the usage goes to only 84 applications! Only 45 applications [out of approximately 5,000] have more than 100,000 active users."

Although it's unclear whether the "Election '08" app is one of the popular ones, it's not doing much to boost Gore's imaginary campaign. Still, he's still coming in at #4 for the Democrats, according to last month's CNN poll (see thumbnail image). Not bad for someone who's not running!

So, what gives? Is all this social networking stuff better left to "the kids" (and I don't mean Al Gore's kids)? Robert Scoble doesn't think so.

[Hat tip to Miguel Senquiz at Flavorpill.net for nabbing the Facebook screenshot.]

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