Answering the call of a Stanford University project called “Peace Innovation,” Facebook started tracking connections made between Israelis and Palestinians, Indians and Pakistanis, and Albanian and Serbian members of the social networking website. According to Facebook’s numbers (available at peace.facebook.com ), 18,624 online connections were made between Israelis and Palestinians in the past 24 hours alone, as of Saturday afternoon.

The Stanford initiative, launched by its Persuasive Technology Lab, was created to encourage organizations to setup a subdomain on their website in order to share their work that “increases peace,” according to its website. Facebook is one of 52 participating websites listed on the Stanford project’s page.

The social networking site was providing statistics for connections made by its members across geographic, religious and political cleavages.

It listed 738 Sunni-Shi’ite connections, nearly 96,000 Christian-Muslim connections and nearly 1,000 Jewish-Muslim connections in the past 24 hours. Although there is a large discrepancy between the number of Israeli-Palestinian connections and Jewish-Muslim connections, one possible explanation is that not every member of the social networking site lists their religion.

Also on the Peace subdomain, Facebook presented results of a daily poll it gives its members, asking, “will we achieve world peace within 50 years?” According to a graph provided, over 20 percent of Israelis answered “yes” to the question.

US Facebook users were the most pessimistic about world peace with only nine percent responding affirmatively compared to over 25 percent in Egypt, over 14 percent in Turkey, over 10 percent in Germany, and around 15 percent in Taiwan. Of the countries listed, Colombians were the most optimistic with over 30 percent giving a positive answer to the question.