If you haven’t heard about this yet, the Obama campaign today released an iPhone app that, among other features, enables you to call your friends prioritized by their location in battleground states.
This is critical.
There’s nothing more important, or more influential, than friends encouraging friends to vote, and when it comes to getting informed on the issues and what’s at stake, nothing is more effective than getting an impassioned plea from a personal contact or relative.
Providing a tool that allows people to get in touch with people who they personally know is so much better than cold-calling phone banking (the importance of that tactic notwithstanding given the need to reach out beyond the friends of iPhone owners).
You can get the app in the iTunes App Store.
The Obama ’08 app development was spearheaded by personal friends of mine — co-organizers of the popular iPhoneDevCamps that we held the past two years at Adobe’s offices in San Francisco (which are now spreading, like all good *camp events should!). Specifically, props go to Dom Sagolla and Raven Zachary, without whom this application might never have happened. But credit is also due to the entire top-tier team that spent countless hours over the past month putting this app together (*iPhoneDevCamp alumni):
- Raven Zachary (Project Director) *
- Jason Grigsby (Project Manager)
- John Keith (Server Development)
- Lyza Gardner (Server Development, Design)
- Aileen Jeffries (Design)
- Jonathan Wight (Lead iPhone Development) *
- Dom Sagolla (QA, Community Development) *
- Mike Lee (iPhone Development, UI) *
- Louie Mantia (Design) *
- Tristan O’Tierney (iPhone Development) *
What’s significant is not only the application, but what this move represents for those of us who live and breathe the web and open source: this app is born of both, reusing a number of open source components and, from the outset, leverages the web with presence on social networks like Facebook. This is the Obama campaign reaching out to the open source and iPhone development communities and working with us to do what we know how to do best, and giving us a space in which we can make a difference for the campaign.
We’re nearly a month a way from the election, and that means that if you want to participate, you’re going to need be registered to vote beforehand. It also means that if you’ve been waiting, or holding out, and looking for an opening to get involved, now’s your chance. As Raven says, making a few simple calls with this app enables even ‘The Two Minute Volunteer’ to make a substantial difference by personally involving friends and family in the election.
Seeing this work inspires and gives me hope; if we can keep up this kind of innovative thinking for the next 30 days, I think it’s clear that the best candidate is going to come out on top and get the country back on its proper footing.
Factory Joe 
Thanks for your early feedback and help in testing this app, Chris! I hereby put dibs on you for our next team. Infinity — plus one!
How great is this!
Very smart.
Using other people’s networks to sell your product.
Great stuff.
http://www.thebadsalesrep.com