For the past year, Floyd "Freshdaily" Johnson has been doing a bit of calculated "friending."

To find buyers for his "I KNOW YOUR PRADA IS BOGUS" T-shirts, the 21-year-old and his partner, James Sutton, 20, reached out to every fashion school network on Facebook.

"I'd send them messages like, 'I got some shirts that you'd kill to rock,'" said Johnson. "I'd say, 'These joints are so fly — and they're underground.'"

Since its launch in 2005, Facebook has attracted 10 million registered users, 60 percent of whom check their messages, scan their message wall or post photos every day. Many of them have figured out the social networking site can be used for more than searching for high-school crushes — it can be used to launch a business.

And why not? Corporations figured this out long ago.

MySpace has been a bigger target — with more than 100 million users and 230,000 newbies registering every day, it's a marketing dream. But in a sea of big-name advertisers and a crowd of consumers that might include everyone from middle-aged neighbors to 'tween-aged cousins, Facebook has provided a more direct pipeline to college-aged consumers.

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Facebook recently began allowing non-students to become registered users, but the community remains only a fraction of MySpace's size and dominated by college students, which is why some companies have followed the crowd. Companies like video game maker Electronic Arts have hosted global groups promoting their latest releases.

But unlike on MySpace, companies like EA don't get jazzed up profile pages or appear in special video game sections. The focus on Facebook remains college students, and college-aged entrepreneurs are taking advantage of that.

Tyrone Allen, a graduate student at Indiana University, for example, lines up buyers for hard-to-find sneakers right from his profile page. He buys kicks wholesale in New York and nearby Indianapolis, posts photos of the footwear in his album and sells pairs to hard-up sneaker fiends around campus.

Marcus "Hottestupandcomingauthor" Wells, 23, hasn't finished the manuscript for his all-about-love book "Silhouettes: A Man's Fortress is a Woman's Pedestal," but he's added over 2,000 users to his global group, a connection for people with a common interest.

Some members create groups as campaigning tools. Wells, on the other hand, has used his as medium for releasing excerpts of his book, promoting pre-sales and marketing himself as a for-hire spoken word poet and public speaker. The alum of Philander Smith College, in Little Rock, Ark., was strategic in inviting members to join his group.

"I started with my school. If I could, I got neighboring schools, then regional — Arkansas, Mississippi, Texas, Georgia, Florida. Once I got a good grasp, I went all around the country," Wells said. "I call it sophisticated business savvy."

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And it's business savvy on a shoestring budget. Unlike movie studios and companies that use Facebook as a supplementary source of advertisement, entrepreneurs like Allen and Wells depend on it as a primary one.

News Feed, a feature that allows a member to see a log of their friends' most recent activities, also serves as an invaluable tool to folks advertising their goods.

Erica Chatman of Chicago wrote a note at 4:34 p.m. telling members how to purchase the Fashion Revolution Evolution Starts Here (F.R.E.S.H.) T-shirts from eBay. When a person who has Chatman saved as a friend logs in to Facebook, they'll get a sneak peek of her latest post in the News Feed.

It's a feature some members shun — if Chatman ended a relationship, posted a new picture or wrote on another friend's wall, then that activity would show up as well. Some folks call it the equivalent of stalking.

But entrepeneurs like Johnson enjoy the benefits of making their business public. Every time the University of Cincinnati junior sports a new T-shirt, folks in Boston, Philly and elsewhere are logging in, seeing by way of News Feed that he's added a photo to his album, clicking their way to his profile and messaging him with their orders.

"Believe it or not, this girl noticed me from my picture when I was on the El train," Johnson said of an encounter he had on recent trip to deliver Cope$etic T-shirts to Chicago skate store Leaders 1354.

According to his Facebook status, last updated 23 hours ago, Johnson is "getting ready for L.A." He's trying to get his Cope$etic brand T-shirts on the salesroom floor of one of L.A.'s freshest boutiques.

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asap contributor Melanie Sims works in the AP's New York headquarters.

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