Earlier today, the Obama campaign released its own iPhone application. And at first, our reaction was probably pretty close to that of our friends over at techPresident. A great little widget, sure — but is it one that’s really essential 33 days before an election?

Two things changed my mind. First, I downloaded the app — and it’s good. It makes a promising start of using the iPhone’s location awareness features, even if it explictly falls short of fully realizing its potential in this arena. Second, it was developed as an all-volunteer effort. Meaning the cost and distraction to the web team in Chicago was next to zero. Using volunteers and open-sourcing their new media strategy enables the Obama campaign to be everywhere, dabbling in cool apps that would be more questionable if they came directly from the campaign. Here’s the blog of one the application’s most high profile developers, and here’s a list (with organizational responsibilities!) of the 10 person dev team. And here’s perhaps the most impressive tidbit:

This is a secret side project that I’ve been working on for the last couple of months. The development started in earnest in the middle of September. The application was developed in 22 days.

What’s above is a slideshow of most of the screens in the app, so those of you that aren’t a part of the Cult of iPhone can experience it. Some of the highlights:

  • Donate-by-Phone: If you want to donate, the app doesn’t try to shoehorn a Safari-based online donation page. Instead, it calls the campaign’s call center to fulfill your pledge. The app recognizes you’re on a phone not a computer, and behaves medium-appropriate.
  • Contact Your Friends: The app grabs your contact list and sorts them by state using area codes, putting swing states up top. This works for me. The people I know who live in Virginia showed up first. Of course, most of my friends and associates are already decided for McCain, as am I. How about the ability to grab the names of 50 random undecided voters and call them on the spot? A tweet from one person on team suggests that they won’t store or send personal info, but the ability to call undecided voters in 5 minute increments is one logical feature that could have been included through tighter integration with Obama HQ.
  • GPS-Enabled Find Your Local HQ and Local Events: This is probably the sweetest part of the app (our sour-est if you’re a righty). Using the iPhone SDK’s CoreLocation feature, you can find your local HQ or local volunteer events. Want to volunteer for Obama in your neighborhood today? The app found at least a dozen events in varying distances from where I sit right now that I could volunteer for. This is actually useful for driving real volunteer and get-out-the-vote activity. Warning: Local Events is the least stable part of the application and frequently crashes it.
  • News, Issues, Photos, and Videos: These are probably throwaway pieces that repurpose straight content from the website, particularly the text-based News and Issues items. Videos pulls in a feed from the campaign’s YouTube account, though only older, highly popular videos are visible through the iPhone. Photos pulls in the campaign’s Flickr account.

Some bottom line conclusions:

  • The app won’t convince any undecided iPhone users, and isn’t meant to. It’s meant to mobilize the tech-savvy faithful in ways that are politically actionable, like volunteering for local events or contacting friends in swing states.
  • An iPhone app will have limited reach today but with the explosion of the iPhone 3G (over 5 million sold in three months) and Google’s upcoming Android platform, rich applications on smartphones will see a hockey-stick type adoption curve in the next few years that those in politics should play close attention to. Limited adoption didn’t stop the podcasting craze by political committees a few years back, except the mobile applications of the future are actually far more useful.
  • Location awareness is a game-changer that makes cell phones useful tools for GOTV. Think of how much of the ground game is location-based; if you’re in the wrong precinct, you don’t matter. GPS enables targeting of volunteers down to the inch. Want to go door-to-door? Here are the 20 undecided voters closest to where you are, right now. Here’s a script and questionnaire you can fill out with a few finger taps. Here’s a short video from the candidate to show the voter. Two or three generations of development on top of the ideas first exposed by this Obama application, and we’ll have a truly killer political app.