Republicans seek social side of web with gop.com
(NECN: Ted McEnroe) – The Republican Party is hoping to take a page out of the Democrats’ playbook, with a relaunch of GOP.com that emphasizes social media. The new GOP.com features Facebook and Twitter integration as well as the ability for users to post profiles, create groups and interact on a number of levels. If it sounds familiar, it is – a lot of the concepts are similar to the social features that made BarackObama.com and “Organizing for America” successful. But Republicans are no strangers to social networking – as the ability of community groups to organize anti-tax “Tea Parties” has demonstrated. The new site is hoping to capture that grassroots energy and take it mainstream – but Michael Steele and his colleagues have taken a few hits on day 1. The site crashed for a number of hours on its opening day, its “GOP Faces” functionality (which features a selection of members’ pictures in the “O” position) has been slammed for a rather questionable representation of Republicans (unless the GOP has become the party of young attractive women and older minorities – I refreshed the page 22 times before I saw a white male), and it’s been dinged for a lack of content. Most of the state pages have just a handful of members, and the “Future Leaders” section was blank for much of Day 1. But there are some possibilities here – the tools are in place to build a community. But just as the grassroots Democratic efforts would have failed without a Candidate Obama to galvanize around, the GOP will need to find a figure to serve as a rallying point – and it doesn’t have that person right now. (Of course, in 2005, neither did the Democrats, so it’s not too late.) Other notes this morning – for the first time in a few months, Google has opened up more invites to Google Voice, its service that allows you to pick a single portable phone number and use it to ring all your different devices, phones, etc., as desired. Current users will get to invite up to three friends to join the service. If you’ve forgotten about Google Voice, it allows you to pick a single permanent phone number and forward it to your other devices, also letting you listen in on voice mails, record custom greetings for specific people or groups, receive text messages as emails and more. What it doesn’t have, of course, is an iPhone app. That has been sitting in limbo for months, awaiting approval in what has become an ugly battle between AT&T and Google. And there’s a new company in the music space, going up against Apple and Amazon. 7digital launched its music store in the US last week at us.7digital.com – the site offers tracks without digital rights restrictions for less than the iTunes store, and those tracks can be played on any player. The company charges $7.77 for many of its new releases, and 77 cents for many tracks. But the company faces a long battle. According to the last survey from NPD Group, Apple iTunes still holds early 70 percent of the digital music market, followed by Amazon at 8 percent.
