Presidential hopeful Barack Obama is set to expose politics and possibly the next election to the world of social networking. On January 16th 2007 a group called Barack Obama (One Million Strong for Barack) was started on Facebook. Today the group has grown to almost 260,000 members and hopes to reach 1 million members by mid March. Various celebrities have tried a number of strategies to increase voting by youth, so it will be interesting to see if taking politics to their digital hangouts proves more effective than the Vote or Die campaign that Sean ‘P. Diddy’ Combs ran in the 2004 election.

Obama recently announced the slogan for his campaign “this campaign is about you” and proceeded to launch his own social networking site my.barackobama.com. While the site experienced a few glitches when it went live, his campaign staff responded quickly and seems to have everything up and running smoothly now.

While it remains to be seen what affect grass roots social networking will have on an election, it will never the less be interesting to watch and see how other candidates and the media respond. I can see new polls being dreamed up on CNN and Fox, factoring in the size of a candidates MySpace and Facebook groups. Do you think Wolf Blitzer would be opposed to predicting the next president based on the number of friends they have in MySpace or the size of their Facebook groups?