Barack Obama Takes on MySpace

Via LostRemote, Barack Obama launched a social network campaign site. From the blog:

Chalk one up for the Barack Obama campaign today as they rolled out a social network called My.BarackObama.com. Create a profile, start a blog, add friends, set up groups and coordinate events. It’s the next level in high-tech campaigning, and I imagine it will be tremendously successful — if it doesn’t implode from all the use (it’s slooow today).

I'm wondering how many of the initial users are employed by McCain, H. Clinton, Edwards, Giuliani, et al. That's got to be one of the more interesting, underreported angles of all of this. It's a potential goldmine, especially if the producer of such social media is slow to act on it and a competitor picks up on some vibe that's swelling up on message boards, blog comments, or other forums.

In college, I was the campaign manager for a friend of mine who was running for a Student Assembly executive board position (he was studying in Israel while running and I was campaigning for him with the slogan "Don't dismiss a man as abroad"). With an email roster of under 40, we had a mole who sent an ill-thought-out tirade or two from the email list to the conservative publication on campus, which gladly published them. That was back when there was some expectation of privacy, the good ol' days.