Hi,
So I wrote a new facebook application that gives you credit for supporting my fathers congressional campaign. My father is running in Texas District 20 (the Alamo District), and I am writing this article as a specific guide to his supporters with iphones/ipads and facebook accounts. (If you do not have a facebook account… now is the time to signup!!)
But no matter where you are this election day, you should use Facebook Places to checkin at your polling station. Why? because anyone building a facebook political applications (like me) will be able to use your checkin to prove that you were at a voting station. This very simple piece of information, where, when and most importantly the -implication- that you actually did vote means that you are a player in what will soon become a very very active political space on facebook.
Remember, there will be a host of facebook applications that check for this data in the coming years. You can be an early adopter of this type of technology even before knowing what application you will be using. This is also good advise no matter who you support politically!!
For many of you, this could be the first time you have used facebook places to check-in anywhere. So I thought I would write you a little guide to checking in. This guide will assume that there is already a location available for you to check-in to, but if there is no such location available, you can follow my instructions to create a Facebook places location to make one for yourself.
First you need to load your Facebook application. These instructions are identical for the iphone and ipad, and should be similar on the Android. If you have not installed the application yet, you need to search for “facebook” in the app store application and download it. Then you should see an application icon like this one on your iphone:
Next you need to checkin. The simplest way to do this is to click the little geo-tag icon to the right of the text field:
After you click there you choose which location you want to check-in too. In this example I am checking in to campaign headquarters. If there is a not already a facebook location for your polling station, you should add one.
Obviously your polling place will not be called “Trotter for Congress Headquarters”. It will be something like “the Smith elementary school”. It does not really matter to much where exactly that you check in to… the application will specifically store your latitude and longitude. Any half-way intelligent facebook application will be able to tell that you were at a voting station, even if you actually check-in at the Burger King across the street. Still better to check in at your actual polling station, even if it means creating a new location in Facebook Places.
Then you will be presented with the check-in interface, which looks like this:
You can put anything you want in the “What are you doing?” field (including nothing at all). However, while an application can understand the implications of your latitude and longitude, your facebook friends might not. You might give a little context to your check-in by saying “Here to vote” or “Dropping my mom off to vote” or whatever. My facebook social election game, does not attempt to figure out if you actually voted, you can score in the game if you just show up at a polling station on election day. It does not matter if you are under-age, or not voting, or vote for the other guy… I cannot say for sure, but I think other vote-oriented facebook applications that exist to serve a particular political candidate will probably follow suit. Otherwise, someone will try to claim that the application “rewards” voting a particular way, and is somehow illegal/unethical.
However, I imagine that you will also see a large number of facebook applications that are not associated with a particular candidate that will ask about exactly how you voted. These style of applications will turn Facebook places into a kind of real-time location-aware exit polling engine… lots of potential uses for that type of application.
But none of these apps can operate without data. In this election (2010) this will be new, and we will struggle to get the word out… but in 2012 and beyond.. this will be more than normal.
Enjoy!
-FT