ShareIn a prior post entitled “The Coming Digital Presidency” I discussed Barack Obama’s use of internet tools in his campaign, and how those tools could be used by a sitting President to greatly increase the effectiveness of government and executive power.
Now the Barack Obama campaign has released an iPhone application.
The application can take a look through your contacts, and organize them by key battleground states, making it fast and easy to reach your friends where it matters for the campaign. The application also anonymously reports how many calls you made nationwide initiated in the application (but not the contact information of whom you called) back to the Obama campaign, so they can judge how effective that feature is, and so you can compare your efforts in calling out to friends to those of other people using the application.
Another feature of the application is that it uses the location capabilities of the iPhone to find the nearest Obama headquarters and inform you of local events you can participate in.
Politics is transforming pretty fast.
Update: One of the four co-founders of Facebook, Chris Hughes (age 24), has been instrumental at making the Obama campaign utilize technology effectively, as described in this NY Times profile: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/07/technology/07hughes.html?partner=permalink&exprod=permalink
