Does Bob Barr Twitter for Himself?
I’m sitting in the Austin airport waiting to board my Southwest flight to Houston and on home to BWI after a great conference at Netroots Nation. Who sits down two rows away but Libertarian presidential candidate Bob Barr. I went on over to ask what anyone would ask: do you Twitter for yourself?
Indeed, Barr says that he does twitter on his own. Barr joins the growing ranks of Twittering elected officials like John Culbertson and Tim Ryan. But unlike fellow Presidential candidate Barack Obama, Barr twitters himself. No staff, no help. (And that may explain why his tweets are a bit…off, at times.
So, congratulations, Congressman Barr, on taking the dive and Twittering for yourself. Have a great flight and and keep the tweets coming.
A Lesson for Local Business in How Not to Use the Internet
The other day I got a menu from Duccini’s, a tasty pizza place on U St. There’s probably two or three others in my kitchen, in the middle of the mess of menus in a drawer. On my way to the trash, the title on the top of the back page caught my eye: “See What the Blogs are saying about Duccinis!”
Wow, I thought. A local restaurant might understand the Internet. I expected to see a review from any of the numerous DC food blogs, or maybe even a comment from Yelp.
No, instead, it’s a screenshot of a random, unnamed bulletin board.
Barack Obama’s One Millionth Supporter on Facebook
Barack Obama is about to get his one millionth fan. The Democratic candidate’s official Facebook page saw a sharp increase right around when Sen. Clinton dropped out earlier this month, and has climbed steadily since. Lucky #1,000,000 will arrive tonight.
At 7:09pm EST - I twittered that Obama had 998,901 fans, and he’d reach one million “by the end of the week.” Then I refreshed the page. Now, it’s 7:29, and there are 999,036 supporters. That’s 135 new supporters in 20 minutes. At that rate - according to my very rough math - Obama will have 1,000,000 Facebook supporters by 10pm EST or so.
The original social networking craze in this election - the One Million Strong for Barack Obama Facebook group - only has 565,214 members. The first million-strong group to actually reach its goal was the anti-Hillary Facebook group One Million Against Hillary Clinton, which crossed one million two months ago.
John McCain has 146,439 supporters, and he saw a similar, though not as sharp, spike in supporters around when Hillary Clinton dropped out of the race.
And finally, as of this posting, Obama has 999,141 supporters. Right on track for one million tonight.
[UPDATE FROM MICHAEL] Here’s a screenshot of when they hit 1 million. (Micah posted another screenshot earlier, with the time included.)
The McCain Campaign’s “Reckless” Email Strategy
John McCain’s online team needs to find someone who knows what they’re doing with the campaign’s email list. Campaign manager Rick Davis sent an email to supporters this afternoon titled “Reckless” - clocking in at 597 words - without including a single link until the 580th word.
Patrick Ruffini noted last week that McCain’s emails read like “Tolstoy in my inbox.” Rick Davis continues the proud literary trend. Look at this mammoth message:
Forget the content, even forget the length. One link? In the last sentence? What is McCain’s campaign thinking?
My guess: it seems like there’s too many cooks in McCain’s email kitchen. McCain’s online team needs to assert itself within the campaign and put the brakes on the email insanity. There’s a reason their email messages aren’t bringing in more money. To start, try shrinking the ratio of words to links in the next email, and then make a relevant ask.
Emails don’t have to be short to be effective - but at least try to engage your readers. A link in the first 500 words would do just fine.
Plus One Me
Very cool new site from Clay Johnson (via Twitter). It’s called “Plus One Me,” and the tagline says it all:
You can rate your friends in three categories (social, mental, and physical), each with a number of different attributes with which you can “+1” your friends. Social attributes include leadership, romantic, and punctual; mental +1s feature honesty, innovation, and adventurous; make them blush with physical plusses like strength, beauty, and cuteness.
The list is growing, too. If your idea for an attribute is accepted, you get +1 creativity.
You can register on the site to collect +1s, but you can also send them anonymously to your friends via email – even if they aren’t registered on the site.
So go ahead, +1 me – I already gave myself one point for humility.
Tracking the Spitzer Scandal on Twitter
Shortly after 2:00pm today, the New York Times posted a front-page story announcing New York State Governor Eliot Spitzer was involved in an interstate prostitution ring. But if you wanted the absolute latest information, close your NYTimes.com browser window and head over to Twitter, where the news of Spitzer’s scandal spread so quickly it was difficult to keep up.
Using the third-party application Tweetscan, you can search for specific phrases and see only the tweets that include your search. In the half hour between 3 and 3:30 EST, there were more than 300 tweets that mentioned Spitzer.
It’s not just the news of the scandal that spread across Twitter; looking at the stream shows folks’ reactions to the news and inquiries about how the story will play out. Some folks are plain disappointed, others lament that he was caught in such a typical trap.
You can also get analyses of how the scandal plays out in the 2008 election. This tweet mentions that both Spitzer and his lieutenant governor are super-delegates supporting Hillary Clinton. Another criticizes the Times’ protrayal of the scandal that implies Spitzer was involved with running the ring, not just being a john.
As David All tweeted early after the scandal broke, the coverage of the Spitzer scandal shows that Twitter is indeed a utility, not just a play-thing. While it’s still a bit inaccessible to read specific topics from within Twitter itself, its open API allows for applications like TweetScan to fill in the gaps.
Facebook Changes “Political Views” Options to Political Parties
Yesterday Facebook changed the way it lets users identify their political views, replacing a simple spectrum of views with a cluttered list of international political parties. Organizing people into political parties allows Facebook to sell microtargeted ads to advertisers looking to reach, say, Democrats in Ohio. Unfortunately, the change in emphasizing in party over position will organize a small base of users who self-identify as members of the national parties, and scatter the rest into free-form identification.
From its inception Facebook offered a healthy handful of political views from which users can choose: very liberal, liberal, moderate, conservative, very conservative, as well as libertarian and apathetic. Most everyone with political views would feel comfortable selecting one of those seven segments. Though for some left-leaning people “liberal” was inadequate, and instead preferred “progressive.” In summer 2007 MoveOn.org staff Justin Hamilton (corrected) created a Facebook group asking the site to add “progressive” as a political views option, which to date has about 500 members.
What Facebook opened up today is far beyond what any users were asking for.
In its blog announcement, Facebook’s internationalization manager said the new changes allow people to express their political identities “just as you can with Religious Views.” This is not entirely true - Facebook organizes religions into two hierarchical categories. For instance, if you’re Catholic, the default selection as you type is “Christian - Catholic.” If you’re a Buddhist, you can select Buddhist, or you can specify you’re “Buddhist - Theravada.” If you want to say you’re a Democrat, you have to write out “Democratic P” to find our country’s party - otherwise you’ll end up in Venezuela’s Democratic Action Party. When you write out “Progressive” in political views, the field defaults to “Progressive Canadian Party” unless you click out of the box.
What Facebook should do is *actually* structure political views like religious views, into subcategories, rather than a giant list of international political parties. First, out of the site’s 65 million active users, only about one-third up to 60% (thx, Fred - Facebook needs to update its press page.) live outside the US. What incentive does Facebook have in defaulting to a list of political parties relevant to small clusters of users?
Political parties should be options as subcategories of political views, so users can still identify first by their positions and second by party affiliation, if any. For instance, just as you can say you’re “Buddhist - Theravada,” Facebook should make it easy to identify as “Progressive - Democratic Party,” “Conversative,” or “Moderate - Republican.”
Introducing two levels of political views is in Facebook’s financial interest; by effectively hiding US parties and encouraging free-form writing in “Political Views,” Facebook misses the opportunity to identify people across broad spectrums of political views. With yesterday’s changes, advertisers can target people who self-identify as members of the Republican or Democratic parties, but lose the ability to find neatly organized groups of people based on commonly accepted ideological identifiers. You can already see it starting to happen. TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington writes in his glowing review of yesterdays’s changes:
I chose to support the “Alliance For Congo’s Renewal” party for now. Just because I really don’t need to see any more political ads.
Free-form political affiliation is all well and good, and that should be kept as-is; it just doesn’t make sense for Facebook to disperse this important information and include largely irrelevant options.
It’s good that Facebook is opening up its profile options for users, but they need to seriously rethink what they just did to their “Political Views.”
Screenshot of writing “Progressive” in “Political Views”
Screenshot of writing “Democrat” in “Political Views”