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TechnologyDaily Mobile
On The Download was The Hotline's dispatch on politics, multimedia and the Internet. See the last installment below or click here for more.
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On The Download
Political Campaigns Finding Facebook Applications by Shira Toeplitz One afternoon in June, graduate student Fred Stutzman took it upon himself to create an application for John Edwards' presidential campaign on the popular social networking Web site Facebook.com. The 29-year-old North Carolina graduate student, who occasionally blogs about politics and technology for TechPresident.com, took what he called "maybe a day" to develop the now 700-user strong online program. "You don't need to be tremendously skilled to develop these apps, and Facebook did that on purpose," Stutzman said. "They want these things to be simple. They want the barrier to entry to be low." But Stutzman's Edwards application is not the first nor the most popular of its kind. The Obama '08 application boasts more than 20,000 users and launched almost immediately after Facebook opened up its application tool to outside developers in late May of this year. But more than two months later, Obama is the only presidential campaign to have an official Facebook application. "If I can write one of these things in a day, it seems a little strange that Obama's campaign is the only one to put out an application," Stutzman added. Since Facebook added the feature, more than 2,000 applications have been built for Facebook, including almost 100 political programs currently available on the site. And according to those same company statistics, more than 75 percent of users have added at least one application. Most political fundraising experts know better than to try targeting college students -- the audience most often associated with Facebook.com -- for campaign donations. But as Facebook's audience approaches more than 33 million active users, the fastest growing demographic on the site is the over 25 crowd, according to the company's statistics. Currently more than half of Facebook.com users are out of college, making it ripe for raising campaign dough and seeking a more reliable voting bloc. "First, it's about going where people are on the Internet, not about expecting them to come to you," said Justin Hamilton, deputy chief of staff to Rep. George Miller, D-Calif., and the force behind the Facebook application MillerTV. "Second it's about who'll you'll find when you get there. Most of the recent demographic growth at Facebook is the 35 and older set. The idea that this is just a bunch of teeny boppers is wrong." But even if numbers are dwindling, is it time- and cost-effective for campaigns to create these applications, especially if they only attract less than 1,000 users? The answer is likely yes -- but mostly because the initial cost and set-up time are low. All of the developers interviewed for this story said it only took a couple of days to create their application. Alex Williams of Splashcast, who created the TV player for MillerTV, said the application took about four to five business days to create. He called the price tag "very affordable" in that it's unlikely to cost more than $2,000 to put together a Facebook application similar to MillerTV. Williams explained that there's typically a base fee, plus the number of users the program receives -- but the first 1,000 users are on the house. (MillerTV is still very much under that cap, by the way, with 119 users.) But despite a low start-up fee, campaigns remain slow to catch on to the feature. The other presidential application besides Obama and Edwards are Students For Mitt and Rudy 2008. The latter was created by a fan of the Republican candidate, former New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani. The developer of Rudy 2008 is Christopher Corbett, a 30-year-old technical consultant for TalkSpam.com and a Giuliani supporter based in Springfield, Mo. Corbett picked up on the idea after seeing Obama's application. Though he said he's had contact with Giuliani's campaign, he said he was not paid for his work -- about 12 hours worth of his time -- that has collected about 700 users. And despite professing his loyalty to Giuliani, Corbett confessed that his motivations weren't entirely altruistic. "As a developer, I'm just trying to showcase myself a bit," he said. |
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