Okay, so “notworking” is far too strong of a term, but I couldn’t resist the catchy title. TechPresident recently did a brief review of Hillary Clinton’s new Facebook app, mentioning that it’s pretty good but that it came around a bit late. This got me thinking about Obama’s Facebook app and the my.barackobama.com social network. Obama’s new media staff has done an excellent job of leveraging the Internet (or the Interwebs as some of us prefer), making it one of the driving forces behind the Obama campaign. However, the excitement over this new type of campaigning aside, I have two critiques of areas that I think could be improved upon.
The Obama Facebook application is very robust… once you actually go to the application’s canvass page. However, I would bet that the most important part of most applications, this one included, is the profile box. It is what my friends see when they come to my profile, and this is the part of the application that I deal with most often. I’ve only visited the canvass page a handful of times. When I want to interact with Obama content, I go to the Obama website or to Digg. When I’m on Facebook, I go to my profile, my friends’ profiles, and my feed.
Unfortunately, the profile box for the application is very limited. Currently, all it has is a thumbnail from a video about Obama’s win in the Maine caucuses. That happened over two weeks ago (an eternity on the Interwebs), and four states plus DC have held primaries since then. This space might be better used by feeding it content from a variety of sources like the Obama Digg account (get me to vote for stuff), the campaign blog (keep me up to date with what’s going on), or YouTube (show me one of those amazing speeches). This could be done automatically through a simple RSS aggregator like SimplePie. Alternatively, it could show me the latest actions that my friends have taken in the Obama application, like which stories they’ve voted for or commented on.
My point is that even though I am an avid Facebooker, I rarely get beyond an app’s profile box, and I’m guessing the same is true for many others.
As for the my.barackobama.com social network, my only suggestion is that they make it easier to find friends. Right now you can search by zip code, common groups, and name, but these are only helpful for finding Obama supporters near me (want to guess how many there are in Washington DC) or if I take the time to enter each of my friend’s names (not going to happen, too many friends). Consequently, I only have one friend on my Obama account, even though I live and work in the most politically active city in the U.S. In short, they need to implement a friend finder that searches e-mail contacts, much like Facebook, LinkedIn, Plaxo, et cetera all have.
Again, these are relatively minor critiques, but I think they are important ones (especially the friend finder). On the whole, the Obama new media team has done an amazing job. I don’t think anyone predicted that online politics would be at this stage at this point in time.
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