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The Barack Obama presidential campaign has tapped Apple's (Nasdaq: AAPL) iPhone to help deliver news and information about the candidate. It's also giving Obama's supporters a new way to help swing the campaign to Obama's favor: a Call Friends feature organizes and prioritizes contacts by key battleground states, making it easier to place grassroots political calls.
"Not everyone can take time out of their busy schedule to go down to their local campaign office to do four hours of campaign phone duty," Raven Zachary, an independent iPhone advisor and project director of the Obama '08 application, told MacNewsWorld.
"In this case, what this app lets you do is pick up the phone and call people you already have an existing relationship with and advocate for Barack Obama," he said, noting that the caller statistics are anonymously aggregated up to the campaign's servers, letting the campaign look at the total number of calls made and the total number of unique callers.
The Obama '08 application is available free from Apple's App Store. While it's a high-profile application, it doesn't look as though Apple's worker bees are highlighting it as a featured app -- no surprise there. After all, the app is all about politics, which most companies tend to publicly avoid. To find it, users will have to do a simple search in the App Store or follow the link on the Obama campaign's official Web site.
In addition to Call Friends, the app has the expected campaign news, events, position statements on key issues, photos and videos from the campaign. It works with both versions of the iPhone running the 2.0 software update, as well as the iPod touch.
The Rise of Mobile Technology
Political affiliations aside, the Obama '08 app brings to light some cool technology and some new implications for social networking. As if this year's election weren't exciting enough, tech heads have to love seeing mobile devices rise so high into the social consciousness of the nation.
"This application signals the wide recognition that the mobile device is a true third screen for digital media," Chris Hazelton, mobile and wireless research director for the The 451 Group, told MacNewsWorld. Zachary also is a 541 Group analyst in addition to working on the campaign.
Hazelton also noted that while the application is certainly innovative, it still has room for improvement. For instance, while it has a dedicated donate button, the button exits the application and initiates a voice call to Obama's fundraising hotline. "It would have been great to see that go through Apple," Hazelton said.
The notion of letting Apple be a direct middleman for political fundraising likely doesn't excite Apple all that much, but there's another way the campaign might have been able to get around it: Sell the application through Apple's developer program. One version could have been free, another US$10, another version $100, and so on. Of course, Apple would have had to approve those versions, and while the company would have banked its 30 percent, it may be hesitant to jump into selling politically charged applications, especially if it makes the company a conduit for campaign contributions.
It's hard to deny, though, that the Obama '08 app is a watershed moment for the iPhone and for mobile devices everywhere.
"While the Obama for America iPhone application specifically benefits the Obama campaign, this will have implications for all organizations engaged in outreach -- political, charitable, and religious groups. All benefit from the immediacy of the media, the power of geographically unbounded outreach, and the novelty," Hazelton said.
Not Just for 'Super Monkey Ball'
While Zachary is clearly proud of the Obama '08 application, he believes that all sorts of other distributed volunteering types of applications will start reaching the iPhone platform too.
"This app is the first in its class, but I think it will become more of a standard. In 2012, with pervasive mobile telephony, the smartphone movement, you're going to see lots of these applications," Zachary said.
"What we've done for Barack Obama's campaign is going to be replicated by other organizations that have a similar outreach desire. This happens to be the first, but it won't be the only one," he added.
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