RNC Gets Technical With BarackBook

The Republican National Convention, an organization which typically supports candidates that are less than technically savvy, has decided to step up their tactics with a new website targeting Barack Obama. The developers of the site clearly have the beat on digital media given that Barack’s newsfeed is called the “FriendFeed”. Aside from that it’s not a complete rip-off of Facebook but it attempts to come close.

The site picks out a random set of “friends” that have less than a positive spin to their profiles. The team also launched a “BarackBook” Facebook application. Unfortunately the application doesn’t work so perhaps this campaign wasn’t thoroughly planned. The website is ultimately a hit job on Barack which attempts to discredit seven of his associates that have a sketchy past.

The fact that the site can only come up with seven “associates” that Barack has at one point associated himself with is pretty impressive. It’s a creative attack campaign and I give the RNC a lot of credit for this. It’s clearly an attempt at generating a lot of negative publicity for Barack Obama. Whether or not they will succeed at it via this individual campaign is another question.

The Obama campaign has been referring all journalists requesting a response to the RNC discussion board which includes a thread called “This Site is Lame”. Whether or not this campaign is successful, it highlights the massive popularity of Facebook domestically.