Do younger voters have something to tell the rest of America? The League of Young Voters and MoveOn.org Political Action are betting that they do, and along with a growing coalition of youth-oriented groups, they are launching a "Facebook Primary" application aimed at highlighting the views of voters under the age of 35. In essence, they're launching a virtual presidential primary in every school and college in America today, along with many workplaces and localities. The primary is the most innovative political use of the Facebook Platform that I have seen so far, and if the League of Young Voters' application takes off, the primary could have a galvanizing effect among the millions of young people who spend upwards of two hours a day on the giant social network hub.

The Web on the Candidates

Advertising Age is reporting that a CNN/YouTube co-sponsored debate scheduled for late July will be the first to feature questions in the form of user-generated videos. YouTube users will be asked to upload their questions to YouTube, several of which will be put to the candidates during the July 23 debate. While some skeptics don't see this as an opening up of the debates to the common people -- only internet activists will participate -- it's still a welcome change to the tired TV debate format that is failing to get anyone too excited.

A new Facebook Platform app called Vote on the Book is seeking to simulate "the 2008 Presidential election process, with just one catch-- every vote cast donates money to the candidate's Presidential campaign. It's simple: you vote, we tally the results and divide our earnings out to the candidates by the percentage of vote they have." Sounds like a nifty idea, though there's no explanation of where the donated money is coming from, or how much is donated for every vote...

[Yesterday, I spent an hour on the phone with Joe Green, co-founder of Project Agape, a still-partially-in-stealth start-up that is developing political social networking tools and platforms. It launched with a major new application built for Facebook Platform, called Causes. In the interview, Green talks about what he learned from his first experiment in building an online social network tuned around politics (See my March 2006 PdF article "Essembly.com: Finally, a Friendster for Politics"), his theories of online organizing, new features that Causes is going to roll out, tools Project Agape is building for MySpace and elsewhere, how to deal with privacy concerns, and how Causes differs from Change.org.]

The Web on the Candidates

Newsvine has created an application called Election '08 for Facebook's Platform that lets you add a candidate or a party to your profile (I've heard that Facebook is working on a native app that will function similarly). To date, almost 18,000 votes have been cast and the most-added Democrat is Barack Obama and the top Republican is -- you guessed it -- Ron Paul, and Obama is the overall leader on Facebook with 21% of users adding him. Fifty-two percent of users have chosen just the Democratic Party, versus 43% for the Republican Party and 3% for "Other." Where'd the other 2% go?

Over at TechRepublican EM Zanotti is hoping that Fred Thompson can bump the "Kucinich knock-off, Ron Paul, from the 'Internet candidate' podium" by continuing to use online video, blogging, and social networking, Twitter, and all of the other fun things the internets have for sale. Some accuse Thompson of being lazy by implying that he won't pound the pavement to campaign, but come on, isn't lazy just another word for innovative?

Imagine this scenario: One day, retail giant Wal-Mart decides that it’s going to open up a section of all of its stores to products devised by outside suppliers, as long as they meet some internal company standards for inclusion. They call this new service, “Wal-Mart Platform.” In advance of the launch of this new marketing opportunity, Wal-Mart quietly invites a bunch of companies as well as individual entrepreneurs to get in before the start, so that on launch day they have an impressive array of prominent participants. A section of Wal-Mart Platform is for causes, but they only invite one presidential campaign in early.

If this really happened, would it be ethical? would the Federal Election Commission deem it legal? Would campaigns from both ends of the political spectrum complain?

Although this is a fictional scenario, the giant social networking site Facebook engaged in something like it in the last couple of weeks, raising serious questions about how a private, but massively used, platform should behave in the brave new world of online politics.