Online Companies on the Election Day

I am not in the US myself now and am not a citizen so I am not voting today but this presidential campaign in the US seems to be the most important political event recently everywhere as it is well known that the US president plays an important role in how the overall international politics are in the next few years. Besides, the world financial crisis has originated in the US and it is quite obvious that comprehensive actions of the US administration will be needed for the entire world economy to cope with the crisis.

And of course it is absolutely impossible to avoid the US election whatever you do online. For example, I have a special folder in my RSS reader where all the news from established web companies and startups are aggregated from their blogs for me to be able to quickly see what’s new with these companies. This folder is usually the first thing I check when reading news and today it was full of election everywhere (even though it should normally contain web 2.0 mostly) so I have decided to collect what the web 2.0 companies are doing when it comes to the Election Day in the US.

Flickr simply calls everyone to vote with a collection of photos (quite predictably given it is Flickr) that I have used in the beginning of this post. Among other companies publishing blog posts to encourage their users to vote are also Jaman and Meebo.

Facebook has built a dedicated election page where everyone can find a polling location on a map. It is also possible to send an Obama or McCain gift to friends (they are free, by the way). Also Facebook has added a special “I Voted” button right to the top of every US user’s news feed. This button is used to collect information on all the users casting their votes for a counter showing exactly how many Facebook users have already cast their votes. As of writing this Facebook tracker reports over 2 million Facebook users voting.

Even Google has a dedicated election site where all the election-related information Google can offer to the users on its sites is aggregated. Among such things offered by Google is a special page on Google Maps where voters can find their voting locations (same as they can do on Facebook). On its official blog Google reports the most popular search terms on the Election Day. Google also offers a special widget you can include right into your own blog for all your visitors to be able to track the results live as they are available.

Also Google invites users to submit their videos featuring their voting experience to the special Video Your Vote channel on YouTube. Another website where user videos from polls are invited is Vimeo: the team has created the Vimeo Exit Poll group for such videos for everyone to see other people’s experience.

Digg and Current TV partnered up to cover the election results live. And of course you may remember that both Twitter and SocialMedian have launched dedicated pages for the election where you can consume tons of election-related news – all in one place of your choice.

And of course there’s a vast collection of dedicated election day logos and themed websites everywhere. Here are a few I have bumped into today:

Ask:

AOL:

Friendfeed:

Reddit:

Add your findings and I’ll be sure to update the post with those facts that you think are worth adding here.