Text messaging could help Obama's turnout, AP.

"What Obama is creating is this army of individuals, these grass-roots activists, who are out there trying to change the world in 160 characters or less," said David All, a Republican strategist who specializes in technology.

Obama's electronic outreach is the most prominent example of a larger movement by members of Congress and political campaigns to present their message and connect with voters through text messaging on cell phones, social networks such as MySpace and Facebook, and the microblogging site Twitter.

In Congress, some Republicans turned to Twitter in their protest of the Democrats' energy policies on the House floor. When the House recessed in August, microphones on the floor were turned off, the TV feeds to C-SPAN ceased and the lights dimmed, but the Blackberries worked.

Obama Selects No. 2?, CBSNews.

How Obama Really Did It: The social-networking strategy that took an obscure senator to the doors of the White House., TechnologyReview.

The MyBO tools are, in essence, rebuilt and consolidated versions of those created for the Dean campaign. Dean's website allowed supporters to donate money, organize meetings, and distribute media, says Zephyr Teachout, who was Dean's Internet director and is now a visiting law professor at Duke University. "We developed all the tools the Obama campaign is using: SMS [text messaging], phone tools, Web capacity," Teachout recalls. "They [Blue State Digital] did a lot of nice work in taking this crude set of unrelated applications and making a complete suite."

Blue State Digital had nine days to add its tools to Obama's site before the senator announced his candidacy on February 10, 2007, in Springfield, IL. Among other preparations, the team braced for heavy traffic. "We made some projections of traffic levels, contribution amounts, and e-mail levels based on estimates from folks who worked with [John] Kerry and Dean in 2004," recalls Franklin­-Hodge. As Obama's Springfield speech progressed, "we were watching the traffic go up and up, surpassing all our previous records." (He would not provide specific numbers.) It was clear that early assumptions were low. "We blew through all of those [estimates] in February," he says. "So we had to do a lot of work to make sure we kept up with the demand his online success had placed on the system." By July 2008, the campaign had raised more than $200 million from more than a million online donors (Obama had raised $340 million from all sources by the end of June), and MyBO had logged more than a million user accounts and facilitated 75,000 local events, according to Blue State Digital.