Yesterday the Democratic National Committee launched Party Builder, a social networking tool attached to their main website, www.democrats.org. This comes on the heels of a similar effort the Republican National Committee launched a while ago called MyGOP.

Party Builder is a nice, full featured tool. The folks behind this did a good job. It just raises two questions for me:

(1) Do people really want to do full on social networking on a website hosted by a political party? I’m not convinced they do.

(2) Is it really a good idea to build a proprietary social networking tool like this when there are so many other options? Inevitably, the DNC effort is going to be clunky when compared to tools like Friendster, Facebook and MySpace. They don’t have the resources to compete with commercial ventures in this space. Maybe a better path would be to partner with existing social networking sites and/or to build add ons (widgets) people can attach to their profiles. Go to where the people already are instead of trying to bring them to you two months before the election.

A screenshot of the dashboard after the jump.