Mark Zuckerberg has said that if Facebook were its own country, it would be the eighth largest in the world. Facebooklandia, it seems, is destined to be a peaceful one. Peace.Facebook.com has just launched. The site is for now a placeholder for bigger things to come. But what it does have already is a rather fascinating pedigree. First, the basics, from CNET's Caroline McCarthy:

"Facebook is proud to play a part in promoting peace by building technology that helps people better understand each other," the site explains. "By enabling people from diverse backgrounds to easily connect and share their ideas, we can decrease world conflict in the short and long term."

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Right now, it consists primarily of some links to anti-violence activist groups, charts showing Facebook friend connections made between people across ethnic and religious groups with a history of conflict, polls about the viability of world peace, and a "Share Your Thoughts" widget--basically, one of the status update widgets that Facebook rolled out a few months ago.

Here's where it gets especially interesting. Peace.Facebook.com is an outgrowth of what's known as the Peace Dot project. That's where various websites around the world are setting up subdomains dedicated to global connectedness, like Peace.Safeway.com and Peace.Stanford.edu. The Peace Dot movement comes out of Stanford's Persuasive Technology Lab, which is under the direction of the rather fascinating Professor B.J. Fogg. Fogg is the leader of an emerging field called captology, shorthand for the study of computers as persuasive technology. Think Nudge meets the web, and a recent piece in Seed Magazine explored how captology might work in the political context. Okay, okay, so I wrote that piece. It's still relevant.

In fact, homing in on the nexus of government and persuasive tech is particularly relevant if you take a look at the social movements highlighted on Peace.Facebook.com. Featured front and center on the site are A Million Voices Against FARC (Colombia), The People's March Against Knife Crime (U.K.), and Invisible Children (Uganda). Those just so happen to be precisely the same organizations celebrated at the Alliance of Youth Movements Summit held earlier this month in Mexico City -- an event co-sponsored and co-organized by the United States State Department in partnership with a number of private technology companies and organizations. More on this to come.