Politics Comes to Facebook

Posted by Nick O'Neill on July 5th, 2007 3:59 PM

Facebook quietly rolled out a new application earlier this week. The politics application gives users the ability to support their favorite politicians and view each politician’s profile. Additionally you can view which politicians your friends support. A bunch of other political applications have launched since the Facebook platform opened up but this is the first one to be developed by the Facebook team. Aside from the Newsvine Election ‘08 application which has over 130,000 users, most of the applications have failed to gain popularity. The Facebook politics application on the other hand has had over 270,000 users add the application. One interesting aspect of this application is that Facebook did not automatically register users to the application. With previous features such as the “Notes” application, users were automatically added. It looks like this application has spread completely via viral means because I haven’t seen the application promoted elsewhere on Facebook. If you’ve seen other promotions, please let me know. I would assume that Facebook naturally has a leg up when releasing applications, just as Kevin Rose has an advantage when he diggs articles (Kevin Rose has 100% of his Diggs hit the front page). As of now the application is pretty basic but they will be rolling out additional features in the near future. Some of the features include “voter registration tools, political issue forums, and our Election Pulse showing how each race in ‘08 is shaping up.” If you want to get political on Facebook and live in the U.S., go grab the U.S. politics appliciation.

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 5th, 2007 at 3:59 pm and is filed under Applications, Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

One Response to “Politics Comes to Facebook”

Ravi Says:
July 5th, 2007 at 6:01 pm
Actually, Facebook *did* add it to people’s profiles automatically.

In the past, if you had gone to a candidate’s profile and pressed the “Support this candidate” box, then I believe you were added to a group with the same name. Later, I think Facebook changed it to just being a “friend” of that politician.

Now, they have gone and silently installed this app on the profiles of everyone who had clicked the link to support a candidate. I know this because they added it to my own profile after I indicated my support of a Senatorial candidate last year, an experience corroborated by some of my Facebook friends as well.