MyBarackObama: Who Built This?

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1. Joost Schuur
   

   February 11th, 2007 at 3:51 pm

   Looks like it’s Blue State Digital:

   http://vox_populi.mydd.com/sto.....0493/49818
   http://www.bluestatedigital.com

2. Ben Mc
   

   February 11th, 2007 at 3:53 pm

   Whoever did it, the layout and user interface are the best I’ve ever seen in a social network. It’s so straight forward and easy to use. Very impressive. Some clues: I see a little “cc” logo at the bottom, maybe we have a creative commons licensed social network system, tinyMCE for visual editors, friendly URL’s that look like Drupal maybe. Good Sunday mystery.

3. Jason Cartwright
   

   February 11th, 2007 at 3:56 pm

   The netblock it is hosted in is owned by “The Burlington Group”, I guess they are a marketing company behind this.

   http://toolbar.netcraft.com/si.....kobama.com

   You’re probably right about the tech being provided from elsewhere - perhaps ask these guys?

4. ShoeMOney
   

   February 11th, 2007 at 3:58 pm

   Hrmm what do they say any press is good press… Good for him for being 2.0 presidential hopeful.

5. steve
   

   February 11th, 2007 at 4:05 pm

   I’d definitely be interested to find out what/who is powering the site. Although social networking software is fast becoming a commodity.

6. Amyloo
   

   February 11th, 2007 at 4:13 pm

   When I was there yesterday, I saw a resource from brightcove.com show up in the status bar.

7. Rogers Cadenhead
   

   February 11th, 2007 at 4:34 pm

   It’s reportedly Blue State Digital using software by Six Apart. I’m digging around the site for some confirmation, but it’s been TechCrunched.

8. Rob Hyndman
   

   February 11th, 2007 at 4:40 pm

   Yup - really impressive job. Looks good on the campaign.

9. R
   

   February 11th, 2007 at 4:51 pm

   bluestatedigital uses the same cms for most of their clients: http://www.bluestatedigital.com/results.html (try finding a login screen for any of these sites, they’ll all be the same)

   source code shows a reference to textpattern for a few of their sites…

10. Todd
    

    February 11th, 2007 at 4:54 pm

    Blue State Digital also built the Democratic National Committee’s “Party Builder” last year. I would guess they used lots of the same code and just put new templates on it, removing the need to do too much extensive beta testing.

11. Thomas Promny
    

    February 11th, 2007 at 5:59 pm

    Btw, take a look at whois for BarackObama.com:

    Registrant: Obama 2010, Inc.

    Maybe that means he’s going to leave the first two years to Hillary.

12. Jon Gales
    

    February 11th, 2007 at 6:05 pm

    It’s definitely Blue State Digital. Took about 10 seconds to confirm:

    http://my.barackobama.com/modu...../login.php

13. Jake Wolpert
    

    February 11th, 2007 at 6:06 pm

    It’s jquery…. http://jquery.com

    Not sure who the programmer is!

14. Rachel C
    

    February 11th, 2007 at 6:07 pm

    Design is by Nick Rigby.

15. Johnny5Zen
    

    February 11th, 2007 at 6:12 pm

    Me.Com

    Instant community! Build your own community with SNAPP! It’s as easy as point and click. Pick and choose from many seamlessly integrated features. Customize your site to fit your community!!!

16. Leo Klein
    

    February 11th, 2007 at 6:13 pm

    It’s very similar to the software used on “Party Builder” at democrats.org.

17. Leo Klein
    

    February 11th, 2007 at 6:14 pm

    Opps, sorry. What Todd said…

18. Todd
    

    February 11th, 2007 at 6:28 pm

    As others have mentioned it is Blue State Digital and this is pretty much an exact replica of the Party Builder tool that has been up for a year on the DNC website.

    Also note the launch did not go particularly smoothly - the tool was down most of the day yesterday.

19. Andy
    

    February 11th, 2007 at 6:49 pm

    I think its http://www.me.com - they produce social software white labelled.

    there platform is really slick

20. ...some Drifter
    

    February 11th, 2007 at 6:51 pm

    i personally didn’t find the site to be that impressive

    but in retrospect, since it was brought up here, i guess it is clean and clear and to the point - a good match for any political runner to make his/her site on

    and it does have a ‘blue’ democratic values/ideals feel to it, lol - i guess

21. fj
    

    February 11th, 2007 at 7:11 pm

    this stuff aint that hard…

22. Mike Trotzke
    

    February 11th, 2007 at 7:25 pm

    >It launched basically feature-complete and bug free, which would be very >hard to do without an extended beta.

    Really? A “feature complete” social site isn’t some complex technical achievement– It’s just a good idea. Now managing the long term traffic a self promoting site can have if it hits the tipping point– that might be tricky if you’re not expecting it.

    I know that this beta idea is very web 2.0. I just think it is a sad state when we are amazed by publicly available software that isn’t full of bugs. Especially, something that has been done so many times before.

    If you love the software your building–you’ll love playing with it and seeing it work too. I’m not saying you’ll catch every use case in internal testing. Web based software should always evolve and improve over time. But to me the beta craze is best case trendy, and worse case just an excuse for not caring.

23. be mine
    

    February 11th, 2007 at 7:58 pm

    love it.

24. Mr. Bhive
    

    February 11th, 2007 at 8:13 pm

    Trotzke,

    Tell me. Do you know, was this site coded from scratch or are they using 3rd party software.

    If you can’t answer the shutup.

25. Seth Morrison
    

    February 11th, 2007 at 8:28 pm

    Guys-social networking software is a near-commodity, the 1000s of chinese social networking sites, mostly home built, should tell you that. Anyone who is raising money for a social networking site builder needs to get in residential real estate construction now sooner than later!

26. Mike
    

    February 11th, 2007 at 9:04 pm

    Um, these sites are incredibly easy to build. Not quite sure why web 2.0 blogs fawn all over “social networks” like they were some form of rocket science.

27. Tom
    

    February 11th, 2007 at 9:11 pm

    I agree Mike, and it doesn’t need to be in “extended beta” just a few days to test the code works just fine. Can’t you find something else to talk about Arrington? Why don’t you find us the next best thing instead of rehashing the same thing you’ve been talking about for the last 5 years

28. Josh
    

    February 11th, 2007 at 9:30 pm

    For those of you challenging social websites.

    Yes, sites ran on software pre-built are extremely easy aren’t they? But do you honestly whole-heartedly think that running a social website is easy?

    Tell me, how many of you have a successful social network under your belt right now?

    And if you don’t, then i guess your opinion is moot. Maybe a political candidate who has put a top-notch effort into connecting their community via a well constructed website is something new to chew on.

    Most people seem to think it is.

29. Mike
    

    February 11th, 2007 at 9:46 pm

    Josh, sure, Obama starting a social network is an interesting idea. The point of my post is that these social network sites are NOT technically challenging to develop. Blogs like this one and the other Web 2.0 blogs treat social networks as if they were some amazing technology. In fact, social networks just add a few additional queries to the standard web message board/geocities model from way back in 1998.

30. thesubjective
    

    February 11th, 2007 at 10:49 pm

    Nice to see collective efforts being put to use by the good guys but it’s going to take a major blue tinted federation of technologist to offset the Fox political agenda.

    They have our children.

31. Steve Parks
    

    February 12th, 2007 at 1:33 am

    I think they might be using Drupal 5. A lot of previous campaigns ran on civicspace which was a fork of drupal, but this has a few bits and pieces that make me think it’s running off the latest drupal release - but with a very nice template on top.

32. Jon Gales
    

    February 12th, 2007 at 3:08 am

    Guys you can stop chiming in about what you think is powering the site. It has already been figured out. It’s not me.com, it’s not Drupal, it’s not “hand coded” and it’s not surprising at all that there are “no bugs” (like that can ever be true…). It’s a pre-packed solution from Blue State Digital. With a nice template. It should probably work for him nicely. In my first comment, #12, I even linked to the admin page. There is no room for argument.

    FWIW it’s not hard to launch a social networking script. What’s hard is fostering a good community. Especially in politics. Helping trade text messages and hate speech for a bunch of political zealots will not help you win.

33. Michael Kimsal
    

    February 12th, 2007 at 5:25 am

    For the record, the “my” portion looks to be running php5.0.4/apache2 on a unixy system.

    http://my.barackobama.com/modu.....7B08C10000

    shows the php5 credits page.

34. Colin Dowling
    

    February 12th, 2007 at 6:01 am

    As for it’s purpose, the site will be an excellent study in to how quickly a community can be cobbled together and how widely accepted the social network idea is in today’s society. While Obama is likely to draw a wide range of people under the tent of his campaign, I would wager that a fair number of them know very little about the personal empowerment of social media. Lots of people who are likely to support Obama probably have little/no experience on a social network. Considering that there are about 650 days between now and election day, I imagine those people will need to get up to speed in a hurry for this to have any real effect.

35. rapture
    

    February 12th, 2007 at 6:13 am

    I use Drupal and it looks very Drupal-ish. I haven’t been able to find any signatures confirming that it is Drupal, though.

    FYI: http://www.draftobama.org/ runs Drupal.

36. Thomas Barker
    

    February 12th, 2007 at 8:12 am

    I wouldn’t be as cynical as Colin.

    Very few MySpacers know anything about the “personal empowerment of social media” either

    They’ll just see it as an aglomoration of hotmail, MSN contacts lists and their local classifieds. Which is pretty much all any SNS is …

    (I could be wrong, maybe all his supporters will go Emo on him and just sit there writing incoherent posts about how depressed they are and how their parents don’t understand.)
    http://www.megatokyo.it/strip/.....al-theater

37. Thomas Barker
    

    February 12th, 2007 at 8:13 am

    That last post required a @ the end.

38. Tony Angelo
    

    February 12th, 2007 at 9:10 am

    Someone else mentioned that it seems to be the same software that is running on democrats.org. Indeed it is. The question that comes to my mind then is, did Obama, Inc. see what democrats.org had done and license that same software from the makers. Or, does the DNC own the software and Howard Dean really likes Obama that much that he let him borrow it?

39. Chrissie Brodigan
    

    February 12th, 2007 at 11:54 am

    The person behind Obama’s site is the former IT director for Howard Dean’s campaign. If you contact Garrett Graff at ggraff@washingtonian.com he can help you get in touch with him.

40. Neil Kelty
    

    February 12th, 2007 at 2:05 pm

    To #11: 2010 is the year he’ll be up for Senate re-election - I assume they either don’t care to register a new corp. or just haven’t updated.

41. Dave Harding
    

    February 12th, 2007 at 4:47 pm

    It’s BlueState Digital. The CMS of this part of the site is done in Textpattern.

    I know because we use the same system at ProgressOhio.org

42. been there. done that.
    

    February 13th, 2007 at 7:57 am

    @Mike,

    Back up what you’re claiming. Have you BUILT a social network? How many registered and active users did it have? How many concurrent requests per second did it handle? How many concurrent database transactions per second were sustained at peak, and what was the performance like?

    Until you put up some data, you’re full of sh!t. It may be easy to conceptualize YASN and it is in fact fairly straightforward to graft a good UI (not that developing a good UI is itself easy) on top of a bunch of RAD scaffolding without months and months of development and testing, HOWEVER, actually launching and growing a successful SN is anything but easy.

    Yes, there are packages based on OS projects out there that provide solid building blocks, but they — necessarily — have inherent functional limitations that must be dealt with in the course of growth.

43. Mike Trotzke
    

    February 13th, 2007 at 2:53 pm

    I’m not sure which Mike the last @Mike comment was directed towards. I posted a while back.

    I was never trying to say that managing traffic is easy. I don’t care what type of software it is, SN or not, load is hard to mange.

    Great article on this topic about MySpace growing pains:

    http://www.cioinsight.com/arti.....842,00.asp

    My complain is about the automatic assumption that an extended beta is a prerequisite for something to work well. I think the whole concept has become overused. If you’re expecting your web based app to eventually reach this magical point where it’s perfect and can go out of “Public Beta”… good luck.