from Harness Racing Communications, a division of the USTA

Freehold, NJ — Most harness racing fans know what a race book is, but how about a Facebook?

The subject of a recent cover story of Newsweek magazine, www.facebook.com, the social networking Web site started by Harvard student Adam Zuckerberg, and other sites like Myspace.com, provide a place for like-minded people to meet and exchange information, questions, and ideas on any topic, real or imagined.

Facebook, with 35 million active members (growing at a rate of three percent a week, according to Newsweek), and Myspace, with 70 million members, are completely free. Groups can be as small as one and as large as hundreds of thousands of people.

Some are cause-related, or connected to political campaigns, for or against individuals or parties or educational institutions. You can connect with those you went to camp or nursery school with, long before you knew the difference between an exacta and a trifecta.

Facebook differentiates itself from similar sites by being based on the “social graph” that founder Zuckerberg says forms the basis of real-life connections. Your basis for joining may be the people you now know, but through those people and their interests, you are drawn in to a larger social network. Newsweek describes social networking on the Web as a phenomenon in which, “there will be a mass movement to access the world through the interests of, and interests in, the people you know personally.”

If the people you know personally are interested in harness racing, there is plenty of room for them. There are groups on Facebook for niches within the niche of harness racing. There’s the group that calls itself, “Harness Racing Junkies,” “My Life Revolves Around Harness Racing,” “Counting the Days Until the Little Brown Jug,” “Harness Racing: It’s Not Just a Job, It’s a Way of Life,” and the confident and defiant folks in “My Standardbred Can Beat Your Fancy…Thoroughbred.”

The demographics of both Facebook and Myspace are heavily on the under 21 side, but older users are the fastest growing segments for both sites. Groups are not limited to human members, either. The 2-year-old pacing filly Justa Minx is a member, with 85 people in her group. Mike Hamilton, who manages the partnership that owns Justa Minx and hosts Race Night on The Score in Canada, does the typing for her.

“Minx has made many friends and a few of them cross over to my friends list as well,” says Hamilton. “We mentioned Facebook one night on the two-hour show that we air on The Score (all-sports television network in Canada). At the time, I was sitting in the studio at Woodbine, with wireless access, and noticed that I was getting e-mails every few seconds. I looked at them when we went to a commercial and noticed that they were all friend requests (people asking to join Minx’s group) from viewers, most of whom were in their 20s.”

Ken Weingartner, a harness racing publicist for the U.S. Trotting Association, has used the networking sites as a way to find stories and students for a program that introduces journalism students to harness racing, called the Clyde Hirt Sports Media Workshop.

“We have 43 friends on our Clyde Hirt Workshop page on Myspace.com,” says Weingartner. “We got one student via Myspace.com and also picked up two story ideas from friends on the site; one about the Massachusetts horse Miracle Mo and his owners, the Bouthilliers. Our Myspace friends, in turn have thousands of friends that we can interact with, or can interact with us. If nothing else, it’s a free way to meet people interested in harness racing, and maybe introduce new people to harness racing.

“It also gets the Hirt message out to a site visited by college-aged students. That’s why we’re also going to add a page on Facebook, which was a suggestion we received from the students at this year’s Clyde Hirt Workshop.”