From a tech point of view, the mass txt message seems to have failed. And Patrick is right, waking people up at 3am isn't fun, or funny. I somehow doubt they were trying to see if Hillary was going to pick up the phone.

But from an earned media standpoint, and an organizing standpoint, the mass txt experiment looks pretty successful. Three million names is phenomenal, especially if they can now segment them by zipcode.

Micah

For all the use of technology the Obama campaign is praised for, they still do not seem to be able to make the best use of it. Even I got that stupid VP text message. So what? I am not an Obama supporter. The Obama campaign appears not to know what to do with the data they are getting or how sort it out.

Worse yet, they have no idea how best to deal with the support they do get. Obama spent as twice as much money on advertising than McCain raised last month, yet Obama is tied in the polls. If I was an Obama supporter, I would have a lot of concerns about being scammed by slick marketing. Why is it that when Obama spends money on ads, the polls favor him even less?

Groups like Moveon are giving away Obama buttons and bumper stickers. Are there limits? How many of these buttons going to Obama fans in Kenya and Indonesia, who are not US voters?

Here are questions which need to be answered: Is Obama just a cult of personality exploiting money from his supporters? Is his campaign merely exploiting feeble-minded people who are emotionally distraught over the state of the world? Is technology merely empowering the meek, ignorant and naive people who do not have ability to resist a cult of personality like Obama?

Take a step out of your political professional/junkie shoes for a moment. Normal people simply don't sit in front of their computers on a Friday night, refreshing the political insider blogs of ABC News and CNN. When word broke even later on TV, it was extremely late on Friday night, not exactly the time of high viewership. Isn't it quite likely then, that for the vast majority of people who opted in to receive that text message, that the Biden pick was in fact breaking news?

I don't think we'll ever know the concrete numbers, but I do think it's quite presumptuous to assume that all 3 million people who signed up had the news spoiled for them because it was spoiled for you.

The selection of the VP is one of the most planned out exercises that a campaign goes through.

It seems really odd to me that they didn't have a plan in place to get the text message out quickly when the media leaked it.

Does it really take 3-4 hrs to get a 146 character text message out the door?

I could see it taking that long if they didn't have the website ready to change over to the new Obama/Biden look, but once again if that was the reason for the delay its incredibly poor planning on their part.

I would have thought they would have had the internet team create a separate version of the website for each possible candidate to 1) prevent leaks from their internet team and 2) to be ready to go if the media leaked it or if some other event caused them to move up the deadline.

This would have also prevented the unfortunate coincidence of having people on the East Coast receive the text message at 3am...