BO, U R So Gr8

[question everything]

The Wall Street Journal

BO, U R So Gr8
How a young tech entrepreneur translated Barack Obama into the idiom of Facebook
By AMY SCHATZ
May 26, 2007; Page A1


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Three years ago Mr. Hughes was a Harvard sophomore, sitting in a dorm room helping develop what would become Facebook Inc. the popular social-networking site, with two roommates. After he graduated last June, he moved to Silicon Valley to work on Facebook full-time. But five months ago he put his career on hold to move to Chicago, in the dead of winter, for a "significant" pay cut, in favor of a 14-hour-a-day job with Mr. Obama's campaign. His goal: to transfer the same magic that transformed the way college students interact to a presidential campaign.

Facebook, MySpace and other social-networking sites allow people to create home-page hangouts and use them to connect with their friends online. People create pages for themselves on these sites that show their name, photos of themselves, contact information and other personal details. They can also message each other, meet friends of friends, chat on message boards and discover new bands. The sites are among the fastest growing corners of the Internet -- social-networking sites drew more than 111 million unique visitors in April, according to research firm comScore Inc. Now social networking is shaping up as a potent new force in the 2008 presidential campaign. Candidates are betting that the sites -- existing commercial ones or their own newly created ones, like Mr. Hughes's My.BarackObama.com -- will expand their power to find and mobilize supporters, particularly elusive young voters who go to the polls at much lower rates than their elders.

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At the forefront of this new experiment in political social networking are young people like Mr. Hughes. Nineteen-year-old George Stern, the head of former North Carolina senator John Edwards social network, One Corps, is so young he'll be voting in his first presidential election next year.

http://blog.johnedwards.com/onecorps

But the same forces that give social networking such organizing value -- giving thousands of volunteers the power to blitz each other with information and cook up plans -- can create new conflicts in a campaign. The tight, message-control instincts of a political organization don't mesh easily with the chaotic, free-form creativity of the Internet. Even the tech-savvy Obama campaign discovered that earlier this month, when officials clashed with the volunteer running Mr. Obama's MySpace page. Another Internet-focused candidate, Mr. Edwards, ran into trouble when bloggers on his staff posted incendiary comments on their personal blogs about anti-abortion Catholics and religious conservatives, leading to their resignation. Skeptics also wonder if the Internet can really translate into votes. In 2004, former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean's presidential campaign won plaudits for its online network, but failed to translate that into an effective on-the-ground campaign structure in Iowa, where it collapsed.

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Several candidates have taken the step of actively developing their own social networks -- Mr. Obama, Mr. Edwards and, to a lesser extent, New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson, New York Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton and Republican Sen. McCain of Arizona -- in hopes of sparking online support that can be translated into real-world donations and volunteerism. McCainSpace allows people to create home pages inside Mr. McCain's Web site so they can recruit other people for his team and raise money. In February, Mr. McCain's Web site attracted some 226,000 unique visitors, according to Nielsen/Net Ratings, making it the most viewed Republican campaign site. But that still lagged far behind Mr. Obama, the Democratic leader, who logged 773,000 unique visitors.

What the Obama campaign wanted wasn't a Facebook clone; the goal is political action, not socializing. The campaign launched its social-networking site using off-the-shelf software but has been tweaking it ever since. For now, the software limits Obama supporters to posting just one personal photo of themselves and other limited biographical information, such as their hometown or a favorite quote. It doesn't allow them to post information on their favorite movies or books. But a "resource center" offers everything from downloadable flyers to broadband videos of Obama speeches and commercials with instructions on how to turn them into DVDs. The site's fundraising section allows supporters to set a fundraising goal and invite registered "friends" to help them reach it -- with a United Way-style thermometer of how close a person is to his target and a one-paragraph e-mail pitch to send to potential donors. Mr. Obama's site is designed to help like-minded supporters across the country come together to generate new financial support, share ideas and ways of volunteering.

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