Facebook members can now vote on the second round of finalists for its FBFund seed funding competition, which will give out a total of $225,000 to five grand prize winners. The 25 companies currently in the running have already pocketed $25,000 apiece for the applications they have proposed for Facebook's third-party developer platform.
This is the second annual FBFund competition, but the first one in which members have been able to vote on their favorite apps. They can vote once per day, and can watch promotional "commercials" about what each one of them does. Voting involves installing an app called "FBFund08," which members can embed on their profiles.
The 25 finalists run the gamut from multiplayer games to college search to event planning.
Not only is the voting system a way for Facebook to promote and reward high-quality apps, but it's also a promotional strategy for Facebook to drum up more member interest in the developer platform and prove that some apps are actually worth installing. Some critics say interest is dropping, and the platform has suffered from months of negative press about "zombie bites" and other goofy apps.
Here's an interesting tidbit: The FBFund08 app was not created by Facebook, but by Wildfire, one of the app development companies in the running for an FBFund grant. Facebook effectively acquired the app from Wildfire to power the poll. But, Facebook representatives assured CNET News, that won't give Silicon Valley-based Wildfire any unfair advantages.
The $10 million initially invested in FBFund comes from Facebook investors Accel Partners and the Founders Fund.
PBS and YouTube are encouraging U.S. voters to take something more than a sense of civic duty with them when they head to the polls on Nov. 4: they want them to take video cameras, too.
The Google-owned video site has partnered with PBS for "Video Your Vote," a project that encourages voters to videotape their polling experience and upload it to the Web. Select videos will be shown on Jim Lehrer's The NewsHour on PBS.
"Voters have documented each step of the 2008 election on YouTube and this phenomenon will culminate on November 4 as people head to the polls to determine the forty-fourth President of the United States," Steve Grove, YouTube's head of news and politics, said in a release Wednesday.
"This partnership with PBS, an organization known for offering rich perspectives, will help voters examine all aspects of voting from the registration processes, to reforms, to technology and election administration, to the actual casting of ballots." Grove elaborated in a video interview with blog Beet.tv.
Gadget company Pure Digital Technologies has agreed to give away 1,000 of its Flip Video cameras to participants who agree to make nine short videos for Video Your Vote: three before voting, three at the polls, and three afterward. A few start-ups, like user-contributed news site GroundReport, have jumped on board as well and are also offering free Flip cameras to readers who participate.
YouTube has a separate campaign, in partnership with the U.S. Department of State, called the "Democracy Challenge." That's geared more toward aspiring filmmakers rather than voters armed with handheld cameras.
The video-sharing site already has a track record for political influence. In the 2006 mid-term elections, a widely circulated video of then-Senator George Allen using a bizarre racial epithet at a campaign rally made the rounds on YouTube, and according to some critics, it cost him the election.
But be careful: Some states have laws governing cameras at the polls. We don't think "Google said it was O.K." will be adequate defense.
When I was a kid, youth-voting organization Rock the Vote teamed up with MTV when it wanted to reach young audiences. But in the 21st century, it's MySpace: the News Corp.-owned social network has announced a contest called 'DemROCKracy,' in which bands that use the site as a promotional tool are invited to encourage their fans to register to vote.
Here's how it works: from now through August 14, bands with profiles on MySpace can install a tool on their pages that lets their fans register to vote. The first 25 bands to have 150 people register to vote through the tool will have their music featured in custom playlists on TouchTunes digital jukeboxes--you know, the kind you see in bars--and then the grand prize winner will get to be the opening act at Rock the Vote's "Ballot Bash" concert at the Democratic National Convention in Denver on August 25. They'll also get some new guitars courtesy of Gibson.
Despite the fact that the show is at the Democratic convention, both Rock the Vote and MySpace's political arm say they are nonpartisan.
MySpace is hoping the contest will spark the interest of some of the many small-time bands that have a presence on the site and have used it to build up loyal fan bases. "Not only will the competition link MySpace's thriving music division with an active and successful field effort but it will also offer small bands, a core constituency of MySpace, the chance to open up for top talent," Lee Brenner, executive producer of political programming and director of the "Impact" political channel on MySpace, said in a release Tuesday. "This competition with Rock the Vote is furthering the democratization of music and the ability of bands to engage their fans through MySpace."
Registering to vote and actually showing up at the polls are two very different things. But since last year, MySpace has been stepping up the effort on youth voting and political awareness as the 2008 election draws closer: the most recent projects have been a reporting contest gearing up for the conventions, in conjunction with MSNBC; an election site powered by NBC; and regular member polls pertaining to politics.
Iowa what?
Amid the frenzied press coverage over Thursday's too-close-to-call caucuses in the Hawkeye State, 153,226 MySpace.com users have already cast their (unofficial) votes.
In a set of "virtual primaries" held on Tuesday and Wednesday, Republican Rep. Ron Paul and Democratic Sen. Barack Obama were declared the winners of the News Corp.-owned social-networking site's polls.
The poll was conducted entirely through MySpace's Impact political site. And for those who have been following Election 2008 on the Web, neither "victory" is particularly surprising.
On the Democratic side, MySpace users selected Obama nearly 2 to 1, with the Illinois senator taking 46 percent of the vote, followed by Hillary Clinton with 31 percent and then John Edwards with 8 percent. Obama's triumph among MySpace's young and tech-savvy user base is no surprise--he has proven a favorite among many young voters hoping for change, as well as a sizable portion of left-leaning geeks.
But in Thursday's Iowa caucuses, Obama doesn't enjoy such a clear advantage--the outcome remains too close to tell.
Ron Paul, however, is a different story. The Texas congressman is considered quite the long shot, failing to poll above more than a few percentage points nationwide. But his libertarian views and vocal opposition to the war in Iraq have found a welcome home on the Web, and MySpace is no exception. In the social network's virtual primaries, Paul won by an impressive margin with 37 percent of the vote, followed by more legitimate offline contenders Rudy Giuliani (18 percent) and Mike Huckabee (16 percent).
"Exit poll" questions in the MySpace primary revealed that 83 percent of participants plan to vote in their states' actual primaries, and 91 percent plan to vote in the general U.S. election. They also named the economy and jobs, the war in Iraq, and health care to be the three most important issues facing the country.
Representatives from the social network, which has launched an extensive youth-voting initiative and political awareness campaigns for the 2008 election, have stressed that the results of the primary represent the "MySpace generation," and consequently probably don't reflect the nation as a whole.
Additionally, it should be noted that while the poll was offered only to members of MySpace's main U.S. site (not its international editions), it did not require respondents to be of legal voting age. And while MySpace has said the average age of respondents is 29 years old, such a figure should be taken with a grain of salt because no age verification system was in place.
But when it comes to the political leanings of avid social network users, MySpace's results may not be far off base. Rival social network Facebook has also launched a politics site in conjunction with ABC News, and ongoing presidential-candidate polls show Obama and Paul as the front-runners there too.
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