The leading social network is announcing tomorrow a plan to a launch a political reality show hosted on MySpace Video and broadcast on TV - it’s a continuation of MySpace’s political ambitions, too: going live in early 2008 (yes, not for a long time), “INDEPENDENT” will allow contestants to compete for a million dollar prize. The winner can then donate that money to political causes, or even use it to fund a political campaign - that decision is influenced by users on MySpace.

Here’s something we’ve been tracking for a while, but it’s bubbling to the surface today. It’s been mentioned in passing in a few mainstream articles in recent weeks, so we give fair probability to the rumor, aired today by Wired, that Facebook is considering the addition of widgets to profile pages. This isn’t part of Facebook Share, which has allowed the sharing of rich media content for some time, but would actually provide a permanent spot on profile pages.

Getting a widget onto a website, whether its a blog or a MySpace page or anything else, is a bit of a pain. Users generally have to copy an embed code, log into their website, and paste it into the appropriate place. While that hasn’t proven to be an insurmountable obstacle, widget startups that have found ways to make it easier for users to add widgets to their sites have seen significantly higher growth rates v. their competitors.

A little over a month ago, social good networking site Change.org launched with exposure few startups, much less nonprofits (which Change.org is not), could dream of - they got Techcrunched. Lots of do-gooders like me jumped on the site and were presented with the audacious yet simple question: what do you want to change in the world? The premise is pretty straightforward - connect people with one another and organizations to push forward common causes (i.e. changes). I perused the site, thought it was a great idea, didn't dig very deeply, felt a moment of kumbaya with my fellow do-gooders and then quickly forgot about it. And based on Change.org's Alexa traffic rankings, I wasn't alone.

This week, the site will introduce a section dedicated to politics, with an emphasis on the 2008 presidential election. Called the Impact channel, it will be an online version of a town square, a collection of links to political MySpace pages that will make it easier for the site’s 60 million American users per month - many of them from the traditionally elusive and apathetic youth demographic - to peruse the personal MySpace pages of, so far, 10 presidential candidates.

On Monday, the site will launch its Impact Channel, a similar idea to YouTube’s YouChoose section - the new venue is already live. The Impact page will link to the pages of all the presidential candidates, and is also connected to “DeclareYourself,”, MySpace’s ongoing drive to get users registered to vote. MySpace also told us earlier today that the presidential candidates are getting access to all-new functions on their MySpace pages: fundraising functionality (similar to ChipIn), sharable campaign badges and political viral videos, which we take to mean that all the candidates have channels on MySpace Video. The fundraising feature will also be widgetized, we were told, allowing supporters to copy it onto their own pages.

Change.org, the social network where users can find like-minded do-gooders based on shared issues that they want to change, or nonprofits that they support, has launched a fundraising widget (pictured left). The widget can be placed on a blog, MySpace, Facebook, or a website.