Lots of people are wondering what will happen to the Obama campaigns huge network of online supporters and on-the-ground organizers, and . But so far there's little hard information. Yesterday, Chris Hughes, one of the Obama new media team's key staffers, posted a short note on his blog at myBO, that began to offer some answers...

Imagine this scenario: One day, retail giant Wal-Mart decides that it’s going to open up a section of all of its stores to products devised by outside suppliers, as long as they meet some internal company standards for inclusion. They call this new service, “Wal-Mart Platform.” In advance of the launch of this new marketing opportunity, Wal-Mart quietly invites a bunch of companies as well as individual entrepreneurs to get in before the start, so that on launch day they have an impressive array of prominent participants. A section of Wal-Mart Platform is for causes, but they only invite one presidential campaign in early.

If this really happened, would it be ethical? would the Federal Election Commission deem it legal? Would campaigns from both ends of the political spectrum complain?

Although this is a fictional scenario, the giant social networking site Facebook engaged in something like it in the last couple of weeks, raising serious questions about how a private, but massively used, platform should behave in the brave new world of online politics.

The Web on the Candidates

Matt Stoller is getting excited about Rock the Vote's new API. "Groups and individuals will be able to capture the number of people they register, the data of the people they register, and the contact information of those they register. This means that, unlike with a standard voter registration download form, the person who asked you to register, presumably someone you trust, will be reminding you to vote... It'll be kind of like Actblue, for voter registration." I admit that I've been getting all excited myself about Facebook's new Platform, and this innovation from Rock the Vote fits the bill too -- potentially connecting millions of new people to waves of data to be shared, mashed-up, and used in unforeseen ways.

This weekend Amy Schatz of the Wall Street Journal published a great profile of Chris Hughes, the 23 year-old wunderkind who is one of the three Harvard grads behind Facebook and now works for the Obama campaign. He now pulls 14-hour days working on My.BarackObama.com and translating his expertise about running social networks to helping run the online portion of a presidential campaign. However, "what the Obama campaign wanted wasn't a Facebook clone; the goal is political action, not socializing," Schatz writes. Hughes is therefore in a unique position to turn the social web into the political web. Read the rest.

It's been quite a day out here on the internets, with the blogosphere buzzing over our story yesterday of how Obama volunteer Joe Anthony lost control of his MySpace Obama page to the pros at the Obama campaign. And now it looks like we're going to have another day to chew over the story, for the candidate himself and the campaign's internet director have waded into the fray.

A little while ago, just before Obama internet director put up a long post explaining his version of the events surrounding Anthony's MySpace adventure, Senator Obama personally called Anthony at home.