If you have any lingering doubts about the power of social media...this might convince you of its potential.

Last weekend, a team from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology won a scavenger hunt put on by DARPA: the U.S. military's research arm. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency had challenged folks to discover the location of 10 large red weather balloons in various spots throughout the United States.

Twitter and Facebook were full of various schemes and offers to collect the locations. (For those of you in Rhode Island: The Washington Post says there were reports of sightings of a red balloon over Providence that turned out to be a Photoshopped attempt to create confusion.)

DARPA allowed nine days to find the balloons. It took MIT nine hours to do the job using social media. You can read all about how they did it.

Sure, the MIT team is smart; sure they were giving away most of the prize money to folks who helped find the balloons. ("We're giving $2,000 per balloon to the first person to send us the correct coordinates, but that's not all -- we're also giving $1,000 to the person who invited them. Then we're giving $500 whoever invited the inviter, and $250 to whoever invited them, and so on...")

But the Internet and social networking were the stars. The contest was held on the 40th anniversary of the completion of ARPANET, creating the technical core for the Internet. And balloons at that birthday party were a perfect touch.