Did Facebook’s U.S. creators realize their social networking site where friends shared jokes, photos and personal messages would become a powerful organizational tool for political groups worldwide?

Web sites like Facebook can be edited by anyone anywhere – one of its 69 million users worldwide can create a group to meet fans of a favorite film and invite people to a house party, while another can set up a group with a political agenda to raise funds from thousands of donors and organize mass demonstrations.

Early on a January afternoon, a young Colombian civil engineer frustrated over the violence in his country created a Facebook group to protest the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC). By the time he got home that evening 1,500 people had joined his group.

Discussions in that Facebook group during the next few weeks led to the February 4 “One Million Voices Against the FARC” march that drew thousands of participants and made international headlines.

This kind of social activism is happening on every continent, and on other social networking sites. Russia’s two most popular networks, Odnoklassniki.ru and Vkontakte.ru, have a combined 26 million registered users.

On May 4, a Facebook-organized “day of civil disobedience” is scheduled in Egypt to coincide with President Hosni Mubarak’s 80th birthday. Demonstrators are urging the public to wear black to mourn victims of a government’s crackdown at a protest (also organized via Facebook) at Mahalla el Kubra on April 6, and what the group calls “the death of Egyptian and Arab media.”

Some Jordanian activists also are using Facebook to plan May 4 protests. But their neighbors in Syria will have to find another way to organize: The Syrian government banned Facebook from its servers in November 2007 and reportedly has arrested some of its online activists.

Are social networking sites an incubator for political reform in your country? Share your experiences with our readers.