"Barack Obama and Joseph Biden are no longer friends": the potential awesomeness of a Congressional Facebook

Saturday was the deadline for the Sunlight Foundation's 2007 contest, featuring a thousand-dollar prize for the best mashup of Congressional data. My politechy friends entered in force, but I couldn't convince any of them to make what I think would have been an ideal mashup/social commentary: the Congressional Facebook.

I'm far from a fan of Facebook, the college-and-beyond social networking site that's become the latest no-sustainable-business-model but-we-love-it-anyway darling of Silicon Valley. Facebook is the social networking equivalent of watching your friends do their taxes--voyeuristic yet utterly uninteresting. But the very characteristics that make it boring and restrictive to use would make it the perfect vehicle for browsing the complex social network that is our United States Congress.

In a nutshell: Use an interface identical to that of Facebook as a way of exploring Congressional actions and relationships. The site wouldn't be a part of the Facebook network--no one could join or "friend" anyone--but would serve as a browsable, intuitive interface for seeing what our peeps are up to in DC. And this is the awesome part: in addition to regular old profile data for each member (hometown, party identification, interests), you could also use Facebook's conventions to represent the actions they've taken while in Congress. For instance:

Everyone with a net worth of over a million dollars gets "rolling around in my enormous piles of money" listed as one of their interests (with a link, of course).
The top recipients of donations from the National Association of Realtors are all listed as having attended the "Party Till It Pops BubbleFest of 2006"
Every time a Republican votes with Bernie Sanders, Sanders gives them a tiny pixelated bottle of maple syrup as Facebook gift.

These are a couple off the top of my head, but there are hundreds more possibilities. I realize that the site would be a pain and a half to code and Mark Zuckerberg would probably fly the FacebookCopter directly to your house so he could sue you in person, but it would be a truly funny, engaging way of viewing some extremely dense information. Most current political mashups seem to take boring, inaccessible data and turn it into boring, accessible data. Useful? Absolutely. Interesting? Very rarely.

16 April 2007 - 1:32pm

Eric says:

I'd also be excited to see just what their various statuses would be...

"Barack is way psyched to see Grindhouse for the 2nd time! OMGGG!!1!"

... totally.

16 April 2007 - 5:45pm

Jon says:

I wonder if Facebook's poor advertising performance has anything to do with the incredibly poor advertising they show on it.

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