I came across a post in my news feeds on Friday, and didn’t think much of it at first. It was a post by a guy who writes about education at a blog called Square Peg, and it was about Facebook. I was in a hurry, so I moved on and figured I would go back to it. When I re-read it on the weekend, I thought it was fascinating — not so much because of what it’s about (a marketing group that hijacked some university Facebook groups) but because of how it has evolved over the past few days.

It started with a simple post about how it seemed odd that Facebook groups for new university classes — graduating in 2013 — had been set up so quickly for different schools, and how many of them included people with the same names. Blogger Brad Ward thought that smelled fishy, and he was right. It turned out that a marketing company with the creepy name College Prowler had set up some of the groups as a way of promoting its university guides, and a contractor hired by the company had set up the other ones. This came out in a comment on the blog post by the CEO of College Prowler, after the blog had already made the connection.

Part of what was fascinating, if you look at the post, is how it evolved over time as Brad got more information, and how a lot of that information came from other sources. It started with the idea that 500 Facebook groups with similar names didn’t feel right, and then Ward created a Google Doc so that other educational bloggers and Twitter users could stay in touch and share information on what appeared to be a scam. As the research continued, Brad kept updating the blog post, each time using a time-stamp to indicate when the most recent update was posted.

Researchers found connections between the names on the Facebook groups and College Prowler by using Google, LinkedIn and other resources, and added that to the post. In a final update, Ward — who works for Butler University in the admissions department and works with social media — said that he had passed the story and various details on to contacts at several education-related publications, as well as the Chicago Tribune.

Is Ward a journalist? Not really. But he got concerned about an issue, did a lot of research — helped by several other people collaborating and sharing resources — and put a lot of data together, making connections and following leads. Along the way, he updated his report every few hours with more information, and then passed that on to “real” journalists. The issue may not be one that everyone would find earth-shattering, but the way it was done says a lot about what Jeff Jarvis likes to call “networked journalism.”

It’s like a war, except with programmers and social networks instead of soldiers and anti-aircraft artillery. First Google opened up its distributed social net, Google Friend Connect — which I have installed in my sidebar and also embedded below — and then Facebook threw open the doors on its version, imaginatively called (what else) Facebook Connect. The aim of both ventures is the same: to allow you to use your login credentials from the network on various sites around the Web, bringing your social profile with you wherever you go. In the process, both companies no doubt hope to entice more people to build a social network based on their tools and services (for some reason I’m reminded of the Catholic Church and the Anglican Church at this point, but that might just be me).

Eric Eldon has a good overview of the differences at VentureBeat, and there is also plenty of coverage at places like Read/Write Web, as well as All Facebook and the always excellent Gina Trapani at Lifehacker. Looking at both of them got me wondering about whether sites like the New York Times will integrate either Friend Connect or Facebook Connect and make them work with the paper’s TimesPeople network, or whether it will work with other distributed social tools like Glue from adaptiveblue.com, which I’ve been testing recently. It’s nice to see ways of connecting to networks without having to actually go to the respective websites all the time.

(Note: My Google Friend Connect box looks somewhat pathetic at the moment — so click on the “join” button and add yourself to my network)

It’s a small thing, but it made me laugh out loud when I read it: the government of Ontario (the province I live in, for those of you outside Canada) has been confronted by a grassroots protest against legislation for young drivers. More than 110,000 people have signed up for a Facebook group that was set up in opposition to the proposed law, which would (among other things) restrict drivers who have a G1 or intermediate licence from carrying more than one other passenger under the age of 21. The law emerged at least in part because of a horrible accident in which a car full of twenty-somethings heading home from a party wound up going off the road and killing three of the four passengers.

A terrible accident, of course. But here’s the ironic part: near the end of my colleague Murray Campbell’s story about the Ontario government’s response, and how premier Dalton McGuinty (yes, that’s his real name) wants to “engage in a dialogue” with some of the protesters who have joined the Facebook group, Murray mentions that this desire is complicated by the fact that Ontario government employees can’t access Facebook at work. Why? Because the province has rules that prevent them from doing so, as a result of concerns about privacy, people wasting time checking their friends’ Facebook status every five minutes, and so on.

Here’s a word of advice for Mr. McGuinty and his government: If you really want to “engage in a dialogue” with those who are critical of you, it would help if you didn’t ban the tools that they are using to lobby you. Just a helpful tip — you can thank me later.

It’s bad enough that people pay any attention to Forbes magazine’s pathetic “my portfolio is bigger than your portfolio” list of rich people, but at least most of the people on the list have actual assets that can be measured in some objective fashion — i.e., by stock-market value. But young Mark Zuckerberg, the co-founder of Facebook, manages to get on the list at #321 with what Forbes calls a “net worth” of $1.5-billion, which is apparently based on little more than someone hitting a few numbers on a calculator. But hey, it makes for a great headline, right?

Is Facebook worth $15-billion? Not in any real sense of the word. Yes, it’s true that Microsoft paid $240-million for 1.6 per cent of the company, which theoretically values the entire company at $15-billion. But the key word there is “theoretically.” There’s about as much chance of someone buying Facebook for $15-billion as there is of me flying to the moon. In real terms, Mark Zuckerberg is worth something functionally equivalent to zero. I’d love to see him walk into a bank with a copy of the Forbes magazine list and try to get a loan for a couple of hundred million or so.

Om Malik posted recently on something I’ve been thinking about a lot: namely, the tension between one-size-fits-all social networks such as Facebook and a more personalized approach using blogs and tools such as Moveable Type and WordPress, both of which have been adding more social features (including WP’s purchase of Buddypress). Bijan Sabet of Spark Capital also posted on this topic, and said that an interest in more social blogging tools is why he invested in Tumblr, and as Om points out, Chris Messina and a group of other developers have also been working on a broader standard for such things through what they are calling the “DiSo” or distributed social project.

Blogging isn’t for everyone, obviously. There will always be those who prefer to use Facebook-style networks — or even Marc Andreessen’s Ning.com — because of their simplicity, and hopefully those networks will be able to “federate” or share information with blogs and blog-based social networks, using OpenID or some other similar standard. For those who want more control over their online data and destiny, however (a group I would like to think is increasing), I think blogs and blog-based tools are the best route, and could be a lot more flexible than any other option given the plug-in friendly nature of WordPress.

There’s also a lot of potential for integrating blogs with tools like Twitter (or Jaiku or Pownce), as well as Friendfeed and others. Om has some interesting things going on along those lines, some of which he announced at the Wordcamp conference this weekend — including a Twitter-feed style micro-blog called GigaOm Daily (more on that here) and a development effort at dev.gigaom.com, where he and the GigaOm team are planning to release something called Gigalogue. According to the description, it is “inspired by” Prologue, a WordPress theme that turns the blog publishing platform into a kind of group Twitter micro-blog, and there are some more details about it here.