Among the thousands of zombie, ninja, pirate and slayer Facebook applications, there are also hundreds of political applications, most of which have little relevance to students’ daily lives.

Brett Horvath, a junior political science major, is developing a Facebook application that has the potential to have some real-world impact. He and a team of three other UW students, a student from Reed College in Oregon, and a high school senior from The Center School in Seattle, are creating an application that would allow people to register to vote on Facebook.

Washington was the second state in the country to allow online voter registration, but Horvath believes the process could be made even easier.

“It’s hard to get people to get on a Web site they are not familiar with, so we created a way to do it on Facebook,” he said.

Once someone runs the application, called “Your Revolution,” on a Facebook account, he or she will be connected with local groups and projects according to their political interests, Horvath said.

Horvath and his group are working with other political organizations around campus to increase awareness about the program. They will also go on voting registration drives to spread the word about the application, he said.

High school senior Andrew Lewis said he was tired of seeing the apathy and growing selfishness in American culture taking away from what he thought were true American values of caring for social progression and change.

That’s what propelled Lewis, Horvath and the other group members to begin work on the project.

“The most important moment in someone’s political life is when they vote for the first time,” Horvath said. “It’s when they become engaged and excited by politics, but people are never in that mindset for the rest of their life.”

The group wants to carry on the initial rush people get from voting by creating a “grassroots online ecosystem for social change,” Lewis said. Their target audience is the politically apathetic Facebook enthusiastic.

Iavor Gueorguiev, a sophomore in the physics department and self-proclaimed “Facebook stalker,” said he isn’t going to register to vote just because it’s more convenient.

“Politics don’t really interest me because I come from a country where people you pick will fill their pockets first,” said Gueorguiev, who is from Bulgaria.

In a different country with different politicians, Gueorguiev still maintains his political apathy.

This election cycle, in particular, has seen a growth in online social networking and user-generated content among the youth vote, including CNN’s YouTube debates and Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama’s own social networking Web site.

The Facebook application is scheduled to launch March 6.

[Reach reporter William Kim at news@thedaily.washington.edu.]