Obama Campaign Takes Control of Candidate's MySpace Page

Monday night, Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., lost 160,000 friends.

To be precise, Obama lost 160,000 "friends," the connections made on the social networking site MySpace.com. The Democratic presidential candidate was not rejected simultaneously by tens of thousands of Internet geeks.

Rather, Obama's campaign wrested control of its candidate's MySpace home page from Los Angeles paralegal Joe Anthony, who had been running it for free for more than two years.

As Obama has emerged as a serious contender for the Democratic presidential nomination, his campaign has shifted from grass roots to professional, from a campaign featuring the anarchy of volunteers to one marked by professional calculation.

And Anthony's story is par for that course. Anthony is now, in his words, "absolutely heartbroken," and no longer supporting Obama's presidential run, and Obama is taking heat in the liberal blogosphere for his campaign's decision. But the campaign now controls what its officials feel they need to control.

The Obama campaign has long crowed about how popular the lanky Illinoisian is with the kids on MySpace, which is one of the most popular Web sites in the world. The senator had more than 30,000 "friends" in January before his campaign kickoff. Interest in Obama's campaign on the Internet is astronomical and unprecedented -- he had about the same number of Internet donors, 50,000, as Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-N.Y., had donors.

Last month Radar Online assembled a chart depicting the MySpace "friends" race between candidates, using characters from "Saved by the Bell" to demonstrate their popularity.

While former Sen. John Edwards, D-N.C., was mired at "Screech"-level status with 24,729 "friends," and Clinton hovered slightly above that with a "Lisa Turtle"- worthy 40,199, Obama achieved a full "Zach Morris'" 148,044. And the campaign has only gained "friends" since then.

Thrilled as they were with Anthony's work, however, Obama campaign staffers occasionally expressed concern with having no control over what, in February, became the Web site's official campaign page.