By Senior Editor – Kris Smith (@croncast)

Facebook has always been a company that keeps its user information close. Of course, that is unless you’re an app developer, you can get a taste but not the corpus.

Facebook has taken a sampling of their data and released report on their blog to answer the question, “How diverse are the ethnic backgrounds of the people using Facebook?”

This is the first of what will probably be many such reports from social networks in the coming year that can help them grow their businesses and possibly those of app makers by sharing a bigger picture than the one they receive from their users.

The insight that Facebook is giving to their network is of great value to anyone that is looking to social networking to extend their business in the United States, the country which sample data was selected from. The report was assembled by selecting user surnames, or last names as they call them in the biz and applying techniques used by the US Census Bureau.

Facebook’s claim about the importance of this data is that it will help them understand the nature of relationships. The San Jose Mercury News agrees with this and is running a great piece highlighting the sociological importance of the data. They’ve interviewed experts in the field as well as users that feel there are other social factors at work that have impacted the network:

Kwixuan Maloof, a San Francisco public defender, said he wonders whether the presidential inauguration helped trigger the takeoff in black members this year.

“A lot of African-Americans went to the swearing in,” said Maloof. “I went to the swearing-in, and I updated what I was doing on Facebook, and a lot of other people did that too. Here we have this very historic event happening, and if you wanted to get up-to-date news, one of the fastest ways to do that was on Facebook.”

Having had breakfast yesterday with a large developer of Facebook Applications I can see this data benefiting his company in a less sociological way and more so in a bottom line way. By no means, what Facebook has released, is a magic bullet or information that have been vetted by a third party, but it is a start.

When you are selling a service and an expertise it is much better to have data beyond the set that application developers can garner and process on their own. This data can be used to create better user experiences for intended audiences and actually improve the life-cycle of campaign based applications.

Regardless of Facebook’s motives for releasing this data it is a great sign that they have. Insight into demographics of this type across the largest social network can help us to understand our digital lives better. They might just teach us a thing or two about our real world lives as well.

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Tags: Facebook , facebook demographic data , facebook user makeup , Kwixuan Maloof , public defender , San Jose Mercury News , social network demographic data , sociological impact of social networking , the facebook era , us census bureau