Politics

For four hours last night, ABC provided a continuous broadcast of Republican and Democratic debates live from New Hampshire. Late last year we saw the YouTube/CNN debates that enabled YouTube users to present questions directly to the presidential candidates. While filtered, it was the first time that web technology was so tightly integrated with the debates. Whether or not you think YouTube was integrated into the debates effectively it illustrated the ubiquity of the YouTube brand.

Last night, it was not just ABC covering the New Hampshire debates. It was instead ABC and Facebook presented boldly on the stage and on the televised event’s pre-roll. It spoke to the ubiquity of Facebook. A powerful statement. Overall for Facebook, the event appeared to be little more than a statement and a highly active application on their site. At the end of the debates, the program cut to an ABC staff member who gave a summary of how the debates were shaping out on Facebook.

She proceeded to cherry pick random statements that users has submitted and stated that Facebook users wanted to hear more about the economy from each of the candidates. That was it! They cut back to the normal broadcast at which point the announcer paraphrased the ABC staff member about Facebook users wanting to hear more about the economy and continued with the show.

It appeared as though the ABC staff member was experiencing information overload in trying to summarize what the Facebook users were saying. Rightfully so. As Anne Broache points out, there were over 35,000 comments posted by Facebook users. A staggering number that illustrates how the ABC staff had no chance of effectively filtering the content in such a short amount of time.

This was the first time though and when the partnership was first announced, Facebook painted the partnership as more of an experiment then anything else. A good experiment it was. Maybe next time there will be a higher level of integration between Facebook and the debate. For now I think this was a great first step and it was powerful to see Facebook’s name branded on the debates. Do you think this was a good level of integration?

Yesterday I wrote about how the Facebook and ABC News partnership was receiving a lot of negative press. I even called the partnership irrelevant. Soon after I received an e-mail from Facebook’s communications department stating “your posting seemed to talk mainly about content distribution. The partnership is actually about starting and ongoing debate and discussion about the presidential election—both on Facebook with the US Politics application and in a real-world, televised debate on Jan. 5.”

Perhaps I missed some of the details surrounding the partnership but my position still stands: Facebook users don’t want to spend their time on Facebook discussing politics for the most part. I still stand by that position. Today, Facebook began promoting their politics application again via the newsfeed to try to encourage users to become more active. While I think this is a great idea I don’t think it’s going to hold. As always, it is easier to be a pessimist so perhaps this will eventually work.

The funny thing is that yesterday, one of the Facebook corporate communications representatives emphasized the telvised debate coming up on January 5th but I couldn’t find any mention of the debate anywhere on the application. Honestly, I just go to the traditional news sites as well as Memeorandum to keep up to date on what’s going on in politics. Do you think the Facebook politics application will gain any traction?

Last night I posted about ABC News closing a deal with Facebook in which they provide their content free of charge to Facebook users. Today the press responded and the response is overwhelmingly negative. Caroline McCarthy writes:

But ABC News doesn’t seem to have caught onto the fact that Facebook’s user base sees the site as a platform for social recreation, not information consumption. None of the front-runners in the list of most popular third-party applications on the site deal with politics or news–instead, they include Flixster’s movie rating application, Slide’s “Top Friends,” iLike’s music app, and the woefully addicting Scrabulous.

She makes a great point. Facebook users seem to be using the site for recreation. The release about the partnership also fails to mention that the content will be distributed through Facebook’s U.S. Politics application which currently has less than 5,000 active daily users ranking it among the least used applications on Facebook. So while the press release may state that ABC News now has access to Facebook’s more then 52 million users, odds are that ABC News won’t be getting much more exposure.

As far as I can tell, Facebook and ABC News simply used this partnership as a way to generate a little buzz in the press the Monday after Thanksgiving. Aside from that, this is pretty much an insignificant event.

ABC News Homepage

ABC News Video Home

Well, they’ve done it.

The fastest growing Facebook group ever has reached its goal of 1,000,000 members in nine days. I must admit, I joined this group relatively shortly after its creation, coming in at number 22,436. I never would have thought that in just over a week, one million Gen Y’ers would be able to assemble for any cause, let alone in support of a presidential candidate, and apparently neither did anyone else.

This leads me to wonder, though. If a cable television host can rally the support of such a massive number of Facebook users to vote for him in such a brief period of time with no campaign marketing budget and no door-to-door canvassing, why are 40% of this one million not yet registered to vote?. Are we to believe that Gen Y has come to its senses that suffrage is the “reason” why US troops are in Iraq? Does this signify a sudden surge in interest in the 2008 election? Is this Facebook group indicative of next year’s “Get Out The Vote” campaign figures?

Probably not. Diddy’s Vote or Die campaign turned out to be all sizzle and no steak, and Colbert’s presidential aspirations will likely fizzle out by election time. As is evidenced by another Facebook group, “I watch Comedy Central for my news and Fox News for my Comedy”, this politically inactive and seemingly apathetic demographic is just going through the motions of showing their support for a candidate, but then again, no one believed that Colbert could muster this massive outpouring of support in a week.

Unless you have been living under a rock for the past week, you have probably heard about the atrocities taking place in Burma. A similar event occurred 19 years ago when 4,000 people were killed in response to pro-democracy uprising. The same thing is happening again and a large number of people on Facebook are organizing worldwide protests in response to the events.

One group, “Support the Monks’ protest in Burma” was adding over 3,000 users an hour at its peak. The group has now attracted over 100,000 individuals and still continues to grow. The group is a central place for the group administrators to distribute news and information regarding protests taking place worldwide today and tomorrow. I went ahead and joined the group but it can definitely use more people. I won’t wax-poetic about the issue given that this isn’t a political blog. If you want to express your support of the Burmese monks, go join the group.

While many of us like to avoid it, politics is a heated topic. There are significant divisions within our country and around the world and with the coming elections politics is going to heat up. A couple weeks ago, Robert Scoble had the opportunity to interview Randi Zuckerberg. In the interview Randi discussed her desire to increase the political activity on Facebook. It appears that Randi is holding true to her promise as a Facebook Political Summit has been scheduled for October 9th in Washington, D.C.

There are also an increasing number of applications looking to tap into the political fever. These applications include the:

• Causes application;
• Jena 6 application;
• Election ’08 application;
• End Poverty application;
• and hundreds more.

While many of us don’t discuss it, politics is something many of us are passionate about. Do you think the younger generation is politically active? How do you think Facebook and politics mesh? Or do they not mesh at all?

The New York Times has published an article regarding a highly controversial group on Facebook. The group denounces Islam and as of this posting has 760 members. The groups states the following:

The Quran contains many lies and threats. Islam is false, no god exists, and someone should say that loud and clear. Heaven and hell are fables, prayer is a waste of time, and angels and jinn are obviously mythology. This is not a group against Muslims. They have it bad enough. If you doubt that go to Palestine. If you hate Muslims or are here to harrass them or promote your religion, go away. Muslims can be and usually are peaceful and respectful.

There is now a number of other groups that have been created in protest of Facebook’s decision to allow this group to remain. One of the groups has over 58,000 members. This is by no means the first politically or religiously controversial group on Facebook but it is now getting significant coverage. The group is set up in support of atheism.

According to the New York Times article, Facebook temporarily deleted the group creator’s account but has since reinstated it. The members that are petitioning the group are threatening to leave Facebook permanently. While that may not have a significant impact on Facebook’s growth, it is a large statement. What do you think? Should Facebook delete the group?

Facebook quietly rolled out a new application earlier this week. The politics application gives users the ability to support their favorite politicians and view each politician’s profile. Additionally you can view which politicians your friends support. A bunch of other political applications have launched since the Facebook platform opened up but this is the first one to be developed by the Facebook team. Aside from the Newsvine Election ’08 application which has over 130,000 users, most of the applications have failed to gain popularity. The Facebook politics application on the other hand has had over 270,000 users add the application. One interesting aspect of this application is that Facebook did not automatically register users to the application. With previous features such as the “Notes” application, users were automatically added. It looks like this application has spread completely via viral means because I haven’t seen the application promoted elsewhere on Facebook. If you’ve seen other promotions, please let me know. I would assume that Facebook naturally has a leg up when releasing applications, just as Kevin Rose has an advantage when he diggs articles (Kevin Rose has 100% of his Diggs hit the front page). As of now the application is pretty basic but they will be rolling out additional features in the near future. Some of the features include “voter registration tools, political issue forums, and our Election Pulse showing how each race in ’08 is shaping up.” If you want to get political on Facebook and live in the U.S., go grab the U.S. politics appliciation.

Browsing through the applications directory last night I came across a new “John Edwards for President” application created by Fred Stutzman. While I don’t think Fred is affiliated with the John Edwards campaign, I find it interesting that this is only the second presedential candidate to have an application. It has been almost a month since the new Faebook platform launched and none of the other candidates have launched an official Facebook application yet. Granted, there is still a lot of time left in the campaign and not all of the campaign’s resources can be dedicated to developing a Facebook application. If these campaigns are trying to portray the image of being technically savvy, then they should be early adopters to new channels of communication. Many of the candidates are now on Twitter and MySpace and also have Facebook groups, but they have yet to launch applications that provide the viral effect that would be highly valuable. Any idea why these candidates have been so slow to launch?

Counting down the days until we have a change of administration in this country? Tired of the same old policies? Count down the days until there is a change of office in this country. Add the Bush Countdown Clock to your profile so you know right when the change of office occurs. On inauguration day 2009 the countdown clock will be sure to let you know that the bad days are behind us. Regardless of where you stand in the political spectrum, we can all admit that there is a need for change in this country. This is the first application that I built on the Facebook platform and it was a relatively easy experience. So have fun and add the Bush Countdown Clock to your profile.