Obama on Your iPhone

by Jordan Yerman | October 2, 2008 at 08:58 am

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Democratic presidential hopeful Barack Obama's campaign has launched an iPhone application. While real-world penetration of this product is relatively low, just the fact that they built an app will boost the campaign's coolness quotient, even though Obama himself uses a Crackberry.

Sounds like a fine way to inform the people (albeit the ones who have iPhones). McCain campaign – where’s yours? Really, though, comparing positions on issues seems much more useful. So how about a little crossing-the-aisle technology initiatives, boys?

Of course, it’s just another effort by politicians to capitalize on technology, as they have been doing this cycle with YouTube, Web-based fund-raising, Facebook pages and fan groups, and e-mail recruitment drives.

The most notable feature “organizes and prioritizes your contacts by key battleground states, making it easy to reach out and make an impact quickly,” according to the software.

An interesting concept, but I'm not sure how useful it actually is. I, fo rone, am keen to see if McCain's campaign follows suit; if so, it would be due to a perceived public-image need rather than any real functionality: the GOP is pretty well-organized as it is.