Facebook 'pokes' used for court notification

Facebook was designed to help people connect with friends and family through messages, wall posts, status updates and a slew of quirky applications. Until now, "poking" was just a funny way to say hello or bug a friend. But it's not all fun and games in Australia, where a judge has allowed lawyers to use Facebook as a more serious communication tool.

A court recently let a lawyer for a mortgage lender use the network as a method of serving legal documents, reports Cnet News. In this case, the lawyer needed to let a couple know that they defaulted on a loan and that their home will soon be foreclosed.

Could this happen in the United States? It probably could, because judges are reluctant to rule out any method of notifying someone of legal action against them, whether that is through MySpace, Facebook or instant messages. More recently, a federal judge in California allowed documents to be served on Wikileaks through email, reports Cnet News.

"I don't see why in the proper case a judge wouldn't authorize it, as long as it was reasonably calculated to reach the defendant," Rory Ryan, a law professor at Baylor Law School in Texas told Cnet News.

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