In the most recent edition of Campaigns & Elections, we learn about the quiet death of a voter-contact technology:
Facebook recently announced a grassroots murder. The culprit? A change in the way Facebook apps interact with the company’s vast amount of data on individual users.
The victim? For the past couple of years, as we’ve described before in TechBytes, Facebook has allowed companies to develop apps that access the friend lists of users. For political targeters, this feature has been a handy way to connect Facebook to a voter file and automate the process of peer-to-peer voter contact.
This development knocks some grassroots tools out of the game entirely! Check out the full article for details, and also note the three other short TechBytes stories that demand your attention in the same column. A LinkedIn for political candidates? Tell me more….
– cpd
[…] can be to build core functionality on the back of a third party service. Colin Delany at ePolitics highlights a Campaigns & Elections story that says that a change in how Facebook allows companies to […]