• TechCrunch, Tuesday, April 3, 2007 10:46 AM

It has more registered members than the entire population of Mexico. As a country, it would have the 11th-largest population in the world. Yep, as you may have guessed, we're talking about News Corp.'s MySpace, the Web's biggest social network.

TechCrunch reports that Rupert Murdoch and co. are announcing an online presidential primary next January--one month ahead of Super Tuesday, February 5, 2008, the day when up to 20 states will hold their real-world primaries. You can bet the presidential candidates, who understand the Web, will be more significant than ever before during this election cycle, will be taking this virtual primary seriously, particularly because so many of MySpace's users are under 30--typically the hardest demographic for presidential candidates to reach.

Many of them are already building momentum through MySpace pages. Hillary Clinton, for example, has 7,648 friends, and John Edwards has 16,921 friends--but Barack Obama is absolutely slaying the competition with 89,465 friends.

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