Obama keeps his finger on the pulse of the social web with a new iPhone app
Barack Obama has had his finger on the pulse of technology and social media since his campaign first started. He has immersed himself in the online world as much as the offline one, and his campaign’s new iPhone app is just an extension of that online presence.
What the iPhone application does is take Obama’s campaign and platform and put it in your pocket. It’s actually a very well done tool. It gives you on the fly political information about Obama, Biden and the issues they are addressing. It then makes it easy to spread the word.
Once you have downloaded the application from the iPhone App Store, you have the ability to wow your friends with on the go facts about the campaign, issues,, the candidates and more. You can read news from the campaign trail, and even sort it by local or national, issue by issue and more. If you like it or if it helps yo in a debate, you can share it on the fly via SMS or email.
That on the fly sharing is what make me love this App. Whatever else Obama may lack in for some people, for me this embracing of technology bodes well for the potential for a fairly transparent Presidency heavily embedded in our on and off line lives should he win, and I think after the last eight years of secret deals and back alley bargaining we need some transparency.
Obama was also smart in how he structured the application to track your outreach efforts. As you call, SMS or email contacts about Obama it marks them called, and leaves the rest marked as have not called. It’s subtle and effective, a great way to quietly encourage his supporters to stump for him.
I’m fascinated by how much further Obama has taken his online campaign efforts than the only other tech savvy candidate from this year, Ron Paul. Ron Paul missed the mark in leveraging his massive grass roots support system into real world voters and campaigners. Obama has figured out how to use social media and technology to get people up off their couches and organizing, talking, volunteering and, hopefully, voting.
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October 3rd, 2008
How does having a mass of people receiving information from a single source and encouraging them to pass that information along to others add to transparency? What it does is ensure the information you are getting is pre-filtered.
http://althouse.blogspot.com/2008/10/obama-iphone-app.html
“The application anonymously reports back the number of calls made this way: “Your privacy is important: no personal data or contacts will be uploaded or stored. Only the total number of calls you make is uploaded anonymously.”
Only an Apple enthusiast used to embracing the idea that an absence of something is a benefit would think this is liberating.
“It’s a good thing my iPhone doesn’t have 3G because it runs the battery down and it’s not swappable” was a good one. Or that Apple dropping the price while AT&T raised the data plan charge made the phone cheaper.
Keeping you immersed in a particular ideology has been used through out history to manipulate the population. Making it portable so you can wow anyone without it is handy and would have been applauded by some of those historical folks.
It may be cool and handy and there is nothing inherently wrong with leveraging technology to make info accessible. But if you can’t see how it’s potentially the antithesis of openness and feel having millions of people using a tool like this represents anything but the ability to turn a press release into instant truth, you are a perfect Obama and Apple customer.