When you click a "like" button on Facebook, you could be telling the world whether you're gay or straight, liberal or conservative, intelligent or not so much — even if you don't intend to. That's what researchers found when they ran tens of thousands of Facebook profiles and questionnaires through a computer algorithm to find the obvious as well as not-so-obvious connections.

The results were published on Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and you can sample the method for yourself at a website called YouAreWhatYouLike.com.

"The main message of the paper is that whether they like it or not, people do communicate their individual traits in their online behavior," said lead author Michal Kosinski, operations director at the University of Cambridge's Psychometrics Center.

Some of the correlations are obvious: For example, If you're a fan of the "I'm Proud to Be a Christian" Facebook page, it's a pretty safe bet that you're a Christian. But others are hard to explain: Why is it that liking the "Curly Fries" page is associated with having a high IQ? Why does the computer model put "Sometimes I Just Lay in Bed and Think About Life" in the category for homosexual females, while "Thinking of Something and Laughing Alone" is linked to heterosexual females?

"These little patterns are really not perceptible to humans," Kosinski said. Sometimes, it takes a computer.

Kosinski and his colleagues conducted their experiment over the course of several years, through their MyPersonality website and Facebook app. More than 8 million people took the MyPersonality survey, which asked participants about their personal details and also had them answer questions about personality traits. About half of the test-takers gave their OK for the researchers to match up their survey results with Facebook likes, on an anonymous basis. More than 58,000 of the volunteered profiles from U.S. respondents were selected for matching.

The results were analyzed to produce correlations in more than a dozen categories, including five widely accepted personality attributes (openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness and emotional stability). Those are the attributes analyzed on the "You Are What You Like" website. The other categories included IQ, religion, politics, sexual orientation, age, gender, race, relationship status, alcohol and drug use, tobacco use, life satisfaction, number of friends — and even whether a Facebook user's parents had separated by the time the user was 21.

This PDF file shows you which Facebook pages are the best fit for each of the categories.

YouAreWhatYouLike.com

Researchers set up a website that assesses your personality based on Facebook "likes."

The researchers' computer model did the best at predicting black-vs.-white and male-vs.-female (95 and 93 percent accuracy, respectively). It could distinguish correctly between Republicans and Democrats 85 percent of the time, and between Christians and Muslims 82 percent of the time.

The accuracy rates for predicting sexual orientation were 88 percent for males and 75 percent for females. But don't think reaching that result was as easy as seeing who clicked the "like" button for "Gay Marriage." Less than 5 percent of the gay users were fans of such obvious pages, Kosinski and his colleagues said. The predictions were based instead on inferences from likes for less obvious pages. For example, the computer model associated the fan pages for Kathy Griffin and "Wicked, The Musical" with homosexual males, while heterosexual males were associated with the pages for Bruce Lee and WWE wrestling.

OK, maybe the pages weren't all that much less obvious.

The model wasn't as accurate (60 percent) when it came to predicting whether a user's parents stayed together or separated before the user turned 21. But even that level of predictive power could be "worthwhile for advertisers," the researchers said. "For instance, digital systems and devices (such as online stores or cars) could be designed to adjust their behavior to best fit each user's preferred profile," they wrote.

"I know the paper might sound like we're criticizing Facebook, but not at all," Kosinski told NBC News. "I'm a fan of Facebook."

Kosinski pointed out that an analysis of your credit card purchases, online music preferences, video rentals and Web browsing habits could come up with personal profiles at least as detailed as the ones that he and his colleagues produced. It just so happens that the Facebook likes were accessible enough to yield a vivid illustration of how such analyses work.

"It's possible this will lead some people to say, 'Maybe I shouldn't be using Facebook, or I shouldn't be using Google.' And that could be bad," he said. That kind of technophobia could hamper technological and economic progress, he said. Instead, the research should lead people to think twice about what they share online.

"We hope this information will help users start a discussion with organizations like Facebook, Google, Microsoft, or even policymakers about the rules of the game online," Kosinski said.

Update for 3:55 p.m. ET March 11: Kosinski's two co-authors, David Stillwell of Cambridge and Thore Graepel of Microsoft Research, passed along their comments in a news release from Cambridge. 

"Consumers rightly expect strong privacy protection to be built into the products and services they use, and this research may well serve as a reminder for consumers to take a careful approach to sharing information online, utilizing privacy controls and never sharing content with unfamiliar parties," Graepel said.

"I have used Facebook since 2005, and I will continue to do so," Stillwell said. "But I might be more careful to use the privacy settings that Facebook provides."

More about Facebook research:

• Facebook posts are more memorable than faces
• Facebook's roots go way, way back
• Scientists map 'Facebook for birds'

The PNAS paper, titled "Private Traits and Attributes Are Predictable From Digital Records of Human Behavior," includes a conflict-of-interest statement: Stillwell received revenue as owner of the MyPersonality Facebook app. Kosinski received funding from the Boeing Co. and Microsoft Research.

Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. To keep up with Cosmic Log as well as NBCNews.com's other stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box every weekday. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

This story was originally published on Mon Mar 11, 2013 3:02 PM EDT

NASA via Twitpic

NASA astronaut Ron Garan looks into the camera from outside the International Space Station in July 2011. "Knocking on the door to come back in #FromSpace after yesterday's spacewalk," Garan wrote on Twitpic.

You might think it's cool enough that NASA astronaut Ron Garan has spent months aboard the International Space Station, but he’s become even better-known as a social-media maven. This month he passed the 2 million mark for Google+ circles, putting him at No. 21 on the Google+ Top 100. His Fragile Oasis postings are a highlight on the Web, Facebook and Twitter. His "Ask Me Anything" exchange with Reddit users went so well he's thinking of doing it again.

So what's the secret to his success? It's really not a secret at all: He’s got a good story to share, about the beauty and fragility of planet Earth.

The 50-year-old New York native is a former Air Force fighter pilot who has degrees in business economics and aerospace engineering. He joined the astronaut corps in 2000, and his training for spaceflight included a turn as an "aquanaut" for NASA's NEEMO underwater research mission in 2006. Garan has been up in space twice — in 2008, on the shuttle Discovery to help deliver Japan's Kibo lab to the International Space Station; and just last year for a nearly six-month tour of duty on the station.

Garan says another stint on the space station is "always a possibility, down the road." But right now, he's focusing on NASA's Open Government Initiative, which aims to build stronger collaborative ties between government, industry and the general public. That means social engagement isn't just something he does in his spare time. It's part of his job.

During a recent interview, Garan talked about how he became a super-social spaceman, and what he's learned from the adventure. Here are some edited excerpts of the Q&A:

Cosmic Log: When you come into contact with the public, what do you find they’re most curious about?

Garan: "Well, what they’re most curious about is the basic question of what life is like, living in space. It really is a marvelous experience. It’s very interesting in a lot of respects — and probably the greatest part about it is that it gave me an incredible sense of appreciation for what we have here on our planet. Everything from just simple things that define the beauty of life on our planet — the breeze in your face, and the smell of flowers, watching a flock of birds and a million other things. After you’re up there for a while, those are things that you really start to miss.

"I had the opportunity to have a short-duration flight on the space shuttle Discovery back in 2008, during which I was up there for two weeks, and then a long-term one where I was up for five and a half months. And it’s a very different experience. You have the same views, you have the same environment that you live in. But being able to see the earth, day in and day out, and watch the earth change ... and to really start to miss some of the things that I took for granted, that really gives you that appreciation."

NASA file

A fish-eye view of the International Space Station, captured by Ron Garan last July, features the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer in the foreground. A Russian Progress cargo ship and a Soyuz crew capsule are docked on the left end of the station. The structure extending to the left of the AMS is a thermal radiator. One of the station's gold-colored solar arrays is visible in the background. And off to the right, the shuttle Atlantis is docked to the station's Tranquility module.

Q: So how did the Fragile Oasis website enter into the mix?

A: "That came out of my shuttle mission in 2008. I had a little bit of frustration. I imagine it’s like when you go to the Grand Canyon, and you’re there by yourself, and you sit there at the rim of the Grand Canyon and you’re looking out over this amazing thing. And imagine that very, very few people have been able to have that experience. For me, at least, that would be frustrating, and the experience would not be as rich as it would be if I had the opportunity to share that with people. So I was frustrated during my shuttle mission that I couldn’t share the experience.

"When I got assigned to my long-duration mission, there’s two and a half years of training, and during that two and a half years, I really brainstormed how I could do that. We came up with Fragile Oasis, not just to have it as a website where we could tell stories about space, but the goal was always to provide a platform for people to follow along on the mission, not as spectators but as fellow crew members. To have an interactive way to do it.

"We had some significant technical challenges in getting that thing off the ground, and it’s still a work in progress. It doesn’t have a lot of the interactive features that we wanted it to have, but we’re working on it. When I launched to the International Space Station, and I had the five and a half months up there, I really was very thankful that I had this tool, this platform, to be able to communicate. And in the meantime, we had the exponential increase in the popularity of social media tools.

"First I did Facebook, but I didn't see that as a public outreach tool. I saw that as a way to connect with old friends, and I was just using it on a personal basis. On the other hand, I started Twitter for one reason: I saw it as a way to do education outreach. I could say, I’m learning about this experiment we’re going to be doing in space, and I’d put a link on there to the experiment's website and the science behind it. I saw that as a very powerful way to do outreach. I now see the benefits of outreach in other platforms as well, including Facebook and obviously Google+. In the case of Google+, I see a very robust mechanism to share the space program and the experience of living in space with a lot of interactive features on that platform."

Q: With all your experience in social media, do you find that you favor one tool over the other? From your comments, it sounds as if you’re seeing some differentiation in how those different tools can be used. Particularly with Google+, you just recently passed the 2-million-follower mark. That must be one of the big successes for your efforts.

A: "Well, I think all the platforms offer slightly different tools to tell the story. I think they all fit together really well, actually. So it’s not a 'one-platform' type of message. We want to reach the broadest audience we can, because the excitement of spaceflight is global. It’s for all humanity. So the more tools we can use to tell that story, and the more people we can get involved with the story, the better off the whole message will be."

Q: Did you have to do a selling job with NASA to do the sorts of things you’re doing?

A: "It took a while to catch on, but it’s catching on now across the board. We realize the benefit of social media. I’m on some social-media committees now, on some working groups to help not only crew members and astronauts, but also thousands of other people who work in the space program. They have a very compelling story as well. We’re trying to find the best way to get that story out. And what we’re finding is that just letting people tell their story in the way they want to tell it is the best way to do it.

"Obviously, there have to be guidelines. But the more leeway we can give people in the space program to tell their story, the richer the experience will be, both for the people who are reading it and for the people who are doing it. That’s one of the cardinal rules here, to give people as much leeway as we possibly can."

Q: Are there any guidelines or favorites that you want to pass along to people who want to be closer in touch with the space adventure?

A: "Oh, yeah. There are tons and tons of people. Most of the astronauts who fly in space right now have Twitter accounts. They’re all on there. There’s also @NASA_Astronauts, where we try to retweet, as best we can, everything from all the astronauts. There’s @NASA, the official Twitter account. There’s the Facebook version, and soon the Google+ version of all these as well. There’s commercial spaceflight: @SpaceX has a social media presence. There are people outside the space agency who are involved in telling the story as well, such as @YurisNight and #spacetweeps.

"What we’re finding through this is that it’s not just the official word from NASA, the European Space Agency and the Japanese space agency. There are citizen scientists and all these other groups that have formed around the idea of space exploration, and they really do a great job of telling the story as well. It’s obvious that there’s a lot of passion and heart and soul that’s put into this."

Q: Is there something about the space story that particularly resonates with social media?

A: "I think it’s because it’s a human endeavor, and throughout the 50 years of human spaceflight, it’s always been a select few people who have gotten to fly in space, and we’ve relied on them to come back and tell us what it was like. Now, through technology and through these new platforms, we can bring people along with us on the missions and have them experience this is real time. You can see example after example of this.

"An easy example is, if one of us sends out a tweet with a picture, let’s say, and we misidentify the geographic location, we’re going to find out about that pretty fast. That happened to me on my mission, and I thanked the person who brought that to my attention. I started sending pictures to that person first, to make sure I got it right. We don’t have a lot of time up there, and all the pictures and all the social media that we do is in our free time. So to have people on the ground, crowdsourcing or open-sourcing or however you want to put it, that really empowers us to do more. It makes communication much more effective."

Q: Have you ever thought if it would be possible to boil down the glory of space down into one tweet? Is there any elevator talk you’ve thought about giving in 140 characters, about what it’s like to fly in space?

A: "You’d need at least 147 characters to do that ... no. I know I couldn’t do it. That would be a pretty remarkable feat."

Q: What’s the one thing that you’d like people to know about spaceflight.

A: "In 140 characters?"

Q: Not 140 characters, but what’s the one biggest message that you think the space experience provides for people on Earth?

A: "Well,  to go back to the reason we started Fragile Oasis: The really compelling reason is that we wanted to use this perspective we have on the planet to inspire people to go out and make a difference, and make the world a better planet. The one gift that I think we get when we fly in space is this perspective.

"You don't necessarily have to be in space to get this perspective, but being in space really reinforces it: You see how fragile the planet is. You see how beautiful it is, how peaceful it looks. Then you realize that life is not as beautiful for everybody on the planet as it looks from space. That's a very compelling thing to experience, and hopefully it serves as a call to action, to not accept the status quo and make life on the planet as beautiful as it looks. That's the No. 1 thing that I want to get across."

NASA

The International Space Station looks like little more than a speck with solar panels in this picture, which was taken from the shuttle Atlantis during its approach on July 10. A first-quarter moon shines on the right side of the frame.

Where in the Cosmos
Garan and his colleagues at Fragile Oasis offer a cornucopia of outer-space imagery and blog postings, including this picture of the International Space Station and the moon, as seen from the shuttle Atlantis during its approach for docking last July. The photo served as today's quiz picture in the "Where in the Cosmos" contest, presented weekly on the Cosmic Log Facebook page.

Len Whitney's comment was my favorite: "I believe it's a TIE fighter ... but those are short-range fighters, we're too far out in space ... Must have taken off from that moon ... Wait a second ... that's no moon!!!! It's a space station!"

For figuring out so quickly that the picture showed a moon and a space station, I'm sending 3-D glasses to Facebook followers Matt Jaworski and Lawrence Johnson. I'm also reserving a pair for Whitney. To make sure you're in on next week's contest, click the "like" button on the Cosmic Log Facebook page and join the alliance. It's not a trap!

More about NASA and social media:

• NASA launches Facebook trivia game
• NASA looks to social networking to lure Gen Y
• NASA leads governmental social-media list 
• NASA launches space station ... on Internet radio

Although Ron Garan is the highest-rated astronaut on the Google+ list, props also deserve to go out to Mike Massimino, the first NASA astronaut to tweet from space and NASA's top astronaut when it comes to Twitter rankings.

Alan Boyle is msnbc.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

Roy and Marie Battell

A male great tit takes wing: Scientists find that the birds develop tight social connections.

The social network isn't limited to humans: Researchers at Oxford University have organized millions of observations of birds known as great tits into a "Facebook for animals" — and have found that the birds, like us, tend to form tight-knit circles of friends.

After you've finished tittering over the name of the bird species — which is also known by its scientific name, Parus major — you might appreciate the other similarities between Facebook affiliations and the birds' real-world interactions. For example, the strongest social connections link the birds with their mating partners or mates-to-be. As is the case with Facebook check-ins, geographical proximity increases the likelihood of social interaction. And there are ample examples of "friend of a friend" interrelationships.

It's not as if the animal world has suddenly logged onto social media. Rather, the study demonstrates that social media such as Facebook reflect the characteristics found in the social networks that are formed naturally by humans, birds and other species.

"From a purely engineering perspective, I would say there are similarities" between Facebook and the great-tit network, Oxford's Ioannis Psorakis, the lead author of a study published in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface, told me today.

The study builds upon data collected between 2007 and 2009, showing how birds of a feather flocked together at 67 bird feeders spread throughout Wytham Woods near Oxford. Thousands of birds were outfitted with radio transponders, and millions of readings were registered from the more than 700 birds that frequented the feeders. Those readings were organized into network maps, which were compared with on-the-ground observations of feeding and mating activity.

Psorakis et al. / J.R.Soc.Interface

This network map charts the Wytham Woods great-tit social network on Sept. 9, 2007. Not all 770 birds of the 2007-2008 season were recorded during that day, and individuals with no connections have been removed from the network.

"If you think of the data about you in Facebook, it records things like who you are friends with, where you've been, and what you share with others," Psorakis said in an Oxford news release. "What we have shown is that we can analyze data about individual animals, in this case, great tits, to construct a 'Facebook for animals' revealing who affiliates with who, who are members of the same group, and which birds are regularly going to the same gatherings or 'events.'"

The researchers found that mating partners consistently belonged to the same social circles, and if two birds became mates during the time that they were being observed, that love connection was "characterized by a rapid development of network proximity." When the researchers looked beyond the birds' mating relationships, the network maps showed a number of tightly connected communities, analogous to networks of friends or family.

Psorakis emphasized that the 2007-2009 research was aimed primarily at creating the initial network maps for the great tits of Wytham Woods. "We are not yet at the prediction stage," he told me. But readings are continuing to stream in. "We are collecting hundreds of thousands of observations a day," Psorakis said.

Eventually, the data may reveal the genetic and environmental factors that promote or discourage social connections between the birds. The technique could also be applied to other species, to see how different animals form different types of networks. Psorakis noted that scientists have already studied the social networks formed by bottlenose dolphins as well as fish and killer whales.

The lessons learned from great tits may someday be applied to human relationships as well. "If we could go fast-forward 100 years from now, you could look at an individual's [Facebook] timeline and infer how, at certain points in his life, certain connections were formed," Psorakis said.

Facebook and other social networks, such as LinkedIn and Twitter, can already give you a list of potential future friends based on the network of friends you have today. How hard would it be to take that capability to the next level and suggest future lovers, future business partners ... or people to avoid? I'd love to hear what you think. Please feel free to weigh in with your comments below.

More about the social networks of animals:

• Dolphin society adopts freewheeling lifestyle
• Even sharks have social networks
• As social network grows, so does the brain
• Facebook's roots go way, way back
• Gallery: The 10 smartest animals

In addition to Psorakis, the authors of "Inferring Social Network Structure in Ecological Systems From Spatio-temporal Data Streams" include Stephen J. Roberts, Iead Rezek and Ben C. Sheldon.

Alan Boyle is msnbc.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

Coren Apicella

A woman from Tanzania's Hadzabe tribe studies a social-networking chart.

Hunter-gatherers exhibit many of the "friending" habits familiar to Facebook users, suggesting that the patterns for social networking were set early in the history of our species.

At least that's the conclusion from a group of researchers who mapped the connections among members of the Hadza ethnic group in Tanzania's Lake Eyasi region. The results were published in this week's issue of the journal Nature.

"The astonishing thing is that ancient human social networks so very much resemble what we see today," senior author Nicholas Christakis, a sociologist at Harvard Medical School, said in a university news release. Researchers from Harvard, the University of California at San Diego and Cambridge University worked together to document the Hadza's social networks.

"From the time we were around campfires and had words floating through the air, to today when we have digital packets floating through the ether, we've made networks of basically the same kind," Christakis said.

Another co-author of the study, UCSD's James Fowler, said the results suggest that the structure of today's social networks go back to a time before the invention of agriculture, tens of thousands of years ago.

For decades, social scientists have puzzled over the origins of cooperative and altruistic behavior that benefits the group at the expense of the individual. That seems to run counter to a basic "tooth and claw" view of evolution, in which each individual fights for survival, or at least the survival of its gene pool. One of the leading hypotheses is that a system to reward cooperation and punish non-cooperators ("free riders") grew out of a sense of genetic kinship between related individuals. But how far back did such a system arise?

To investigate that question, researchers spent two months interviewing more than 200 adult members of the Hadza group who still live in a traditional, nomadic, pre-agricultural setting. To chart the social connections, the researchers asked the adults to identify the individuals they'd like to live with in their next encampment. They also looked into gift-giving connections by giving their experimental subjects three straws of honey — one of the Hadza's best-loved treats — and asking them to assign them secretly to anyone else in the camp. That exercise produced a complex web of 1,263 "campmate ties" and 426 "gift ties."

Separately, the researchers gave the Hadza additional honey straws that they could either keep for themselves or donate for group distribution. That was used as a measure of cooperation vs. non-cooperation.

When the researchers analyzed all the linkages, they found that cooperators tended to group themselves together into one set of social clusters, while non-cooperators were in separate clusters. Even when other factors were taken into account, such as connections between kin and geographical proximity, the cooperation vs. non-cooperation distinction was significant. That finding suggested that even in pre-agricultural societies, social networking strengthened the connections between people inclined toward different kinds of behavior.

"If you can get cooperators to cluster together in social space, cooperation can evolve," said Coren Apicella, a postdoctoral researcher specializing in health-care policy at Harvard Medical School and the Nature paper's first author. "Social networks allow this to happen."

The researchers said the dynamics of the Hadza social networks — including the kinds of ties that bind a group's most popular members and the reciprocal connections within the group — were indistinguishable from previously gathered data about social networks in modern communities.

"We turned the data over lots of different ways," Fowler said in the news release. "We looked at over a dozen measures that social network analysts use to compare networks, and pretty much, the Hadza are like us."

Beyond the Facebook angle, the rise of relationships between cooperative individuals has larger implications for the study of human evolution. "This suggests that social networks may have co-evolved with the widespread cooperation in humans that we observe today," the researchers wrote.

Update for 2:15 p.m. ET: In a Nature commentary, University of British Columbia anthropologist Joseph Henrich said that the study provided a "glimpse into the social dynamics of one of the few remaining populations of nomadic hunter-gatherers" — and pointed up the parallels between modern-day social networking and the kind of society in which our distant ancestors lived.

One of the more interesting findings was that non-cooperators preferred to associate with other non-cooperators, rather than with the givers in the Hadza group, Henrich told me. That could be because people tend to make those they associate with more similar to themselves — sort of like a curmudgeonly married couple. Or it could be because non-cooperative types avoid the cooperators in the first place — sort of like the high-school kids who shun the goody-goodies and form their own clique of bad boys and girls.

Henrich said the cooperation vs. non-cooperation distinction was surprisingly strong. "In fact, the gift-network results indicate that this extends to friends of friends: if your friend's friend is highly cooperative, you are likely to cooperate more, too."

He said the findings support the principle of homophily in social relations: "People tend to pick people like themselves." But does the cooperation connection apply to modern-day social networks as well? If you're a giving person, do you tend to friend other givers online? "We don't know," Henrich told me. That's a topic for further research.

Update for 10:35 p.m. ET: In a follow-up phone interview, Fowler told me the results that he and his colleagues are reporting add a new twist to the old nature vs. nurture debate. People aren't shaped merely by genetics and their physical environment, he said.

"Social networks were actually just as important as the other two," he said. There may even be a genetic component to the associations you make. Along with Christakis and UCSD's Christopher Dawes, Fowler conducted research suggesting that genetic factors affect social behaviors. Previous studies have also shown that social networking among hunter-gatherer societies like the Hadza are not governed strictly by kin-based relationships.

"What's new here is that we've specifically tied this idea of cooperation to ties between non-kin," Fowler said.

Fowler acknowledged that studying hunter-gatherer societies are not a foolproof way to trace the evolutionary roots of the behaviors we see in modern-day society, including Facebook friending and Twitter tweeting. "This isn't necessarily the be-all and end-all of determining what we were like hundreds of thousands of years ago," he said. But considering that scientists can't interview Stone Age social networkers, Fowler believes this is one of the best methods available to anthropologists.

More social-network science:

• Human brain limits Twitter friends
• As social network grows, so does the brain
• Study suggests blogging makes new moms happy
• Key to social-network success: Get a media star to join

In addition to Apicella, Christakis and Fowler, authors of "Social Networks and Cooperation in Hunter-Gatherers" include Cambridge University's Frank Marlowe.

Alan Boyle is msnbc.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter or adding Cosmic Log's Google+ page to your circle. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for other worlds.

Funium

FamilyVillage features cute characters that can be "immigrated" into the game along with their vital records.

Family Village is a Facebook game that lets you create cartoon characters representing your forebears, associate them with vital records and documents, send them through "immigration" into a virtual world — and then put them to work. Think of it as a CityVille populated by your ancestors.

"This is not meant to be a genealogy game,” said Jeff Wells, the chief executive officer of Utah-based Funium. “It’s a game that incorporates genealogy."

Funium is rolling out Family Village on Facebook in semi-stealth mode. "We're up to around 14,000 or 15,000 installs, which is relatively small in this environment. Our objective is millions," he told me this week. Then, knowing my background, he invoked a metaphor close to my heart: "We're pushing the shuttle to the launch pad."

I've paid for genetic tests and document searches in hopes of uncovering more of my Boyle family roots. I've traveled to Ireland to check parish records, and riffled through countless rolls of microfilm looking for clues. But I've never played a Facebook game, and I'm not sure Family Village will get me started. But then again, I'm really not the target audience for the game.

"It's not supposed to do your genealogy," said Wells, who previously served as the CEO of the GeneTree DNA testing company. "It just makes genealogy more interesting. This is meant for the masses. My intent is to get people who are disinterested in family history interested."

Updating the family quest
In the pre-Facebook age, genealogy was traditionally ranked among the country's most popular hobbies (right up there with stamp collecting). But today, online social networking takes up increasing amounts of leisure time. In February, comScore reported that the average Internet user spent more than four hours a month on social-media sites. In a sense, Family Village and similar genealogy apps (such as the popular "We're Related" Facebook app) represent efforts to update the hobby for the 21st century.

"We have incorporated family history into the social gaming environment," Wells said. "That's the first time that's been done."

Funium via Business Wire

Family Village lets you build a community for the relatives that "immigrate" into the Facebook game.

Family Village is also built to incorporate information from We're Related, Family Link and other online genealogical resources. As you create game characters, you can add in data from your own genealogical records, about birth, death, marriage and all the other family-tree basics. The game platform is designed to suggest archived documents or other resources that may relate to your relatives. Some resources come free, while others can be purchased using Facebook-based micropayments.

Like CityVille, Family Village offers plenty of items to buy, including houses and landscaping, pets and vehicles, and even monuments with national-origin themes. (So your ancestors were English? Buy a Union Jack or a London Bridge for your family's virtual digs.) You can either kick in real-world money for purchases, or have your characters toil away at their virtual jobs to build up reserves of virtual cash.

Wells said the initial reviews from beta-testers have been positive. Funium's news release cites the case of Sandra Gwilliam, a grandmother who plays Family Village with her children and grandchildren. "If people can play the game with their ancestors, it makes the ancestors seem more real," Gwilliam said.

What about privacy?
Personal privacy is a big concern for online genealogy as well as for Facebook usage. For example, you wouldn't want to have your mother's maiden name freely accessible for any old friend to see. And your living relatives wouldn't appreciate having their basic stats displayed without their consent.

Wells said Family Village addresses the privacy issue by letting users control how much information they want to make public. "We follow all the Facebook privacy and security provisions," he told me. "We don't share anything more than what Facebook would allow. and their provisions have become pretty strict lately."

By default, a Facebook user visiting your Family Village community would have limited access to the data associated with the characters who populate the place. "If you elect to, for that person visiting your village, you could give them authorization to see your family tree," Wells said.

The game may also alert players to check particular databases or documents, based on the information they've provided, but Wells said "we're not accessing any information that they're not confiding on the Internet."

Family Village may not be as high-tech as Y-chromosome or mitochondrial DNA testing, but Wells said the goal of the game has much in common with genetic genealogy. "We want to make sure that, at the end of the day, people learn that we are part of one great family tree," he told me. "For those who aren't interested necessarily in DNA or genetics, we can still accomplish the same thing by having people realize that we have many, many cousins out there."

So what do you think, cousin? Feel free to share your thoughts about the family quest and/or Facebook games as a comment below.

More about genealogy:

• Black history saga comes full circle
• Pilgrims and Indians in her family tree
• DNA takes on a family's mysteries
• The wearin' o' the genes

Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page or following @b0yle on Twitter. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.