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White House Launches an iPhone App, Mobile Web Site Coming Soon

by Terrence O'Brien on January 20, 2010 at 05:01 PM

White House Launches an iPhone App, Mobile Web Site Coming SoonIn spite of its other perceived failures, the Obama administration has actually succeeded quite admirably at one of its promises: technologically ushering the White House into the 21st century. It has embraced blogging, streaming video, Twitter, crowd-sourcing, and has even created new positions within the government and armed forces that specifically deal with the challenges of running and defending a country in the age of the Internet.

The latest move toward keeping up with the connected masses is the White House iPhone app. The White House has now brought its own official, free application to the iTunes App Store, providing news, press briefings, blog posts, and archived video of events and speeches. But the killer feature is undeniably its ability to stream live video coverage of events (even over 3G!), including next week's State of the Union Address. Live streaming won't be limited to major speeches, though; Obama's speech on National Mentoring Month this afternoon will be available, as will his town hall meeting in Ohio this Friday.

In the coming weeks, the White House also plans to launch a proper mobile version of its Web site at mobile.whitehouse.gov, putting the administration in the palm of your hand, regardless of your choice in mobile-computing platform.

The only glaring omission from the iPhone app? Social networking. The ability to share news items and video, or invite others to watch live streams via Twitter and Facebook seems like a no-brainer to us. [From: WhiteHouse.Gov and Mashable]

Tags: app store, AppStore, Barack Obama, BarackObama, government, iphone app, IphoneApp, politics, State of the Union, StateOfTheUnion, top, white house, WhiteHouse

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