Hillary Glares, Rudy Remains Private, Rapture Loves Romney on MySpace Impact

“All young Americans deserve a world without end not a war without end,” reads an image on Dennis Kucinich’s MySpace profile. He’s there along with nine other presidential contenders from both sides of the aisle.

MySpace unveiled its “Impact” section today, in order to compile profile pages dedicated to advocacy groups and political candidates. Campaigns have the ability to include a widget on their profiles that links directly to their fundraising pages on their own sites. MySpace is also allowing users to put an image on their own profiles touting the fact that they’ve donated.

The section also links to political news stories around the Web, civic-oriented MySpace videos, cause-related events promoted on MySpace (like the fourth annual Kokua Festival on Earth Day weekend), content from do-gooder mag, Good Magazine, and even features ads for jobs that “make an impact.”

Exactly what kind of impact a technical manager or business analyst gig — two of the ones listed on the main Impact page — would make is anyone’s guess.

I just spoke with MySpace, and the company is not charging campaigns to be highlighted in the section; however, at least one candidate with what looks to be an official profile, Senator Chris
Dodd, is not featured there. I noticed the same problem with YouTube’s new YouChoose section. Either Dodd’s campaign is making this request, or he’s off the social site radar.

According to my contact there, MySpace has no plans to offer political advertisers paid custom promotional pages the way it does for countless entertainment brands and other advertisers. Facebook has allowed political advertisers to pay for groups since the ’06 election.

Already strange things are afoot. First off, I can’t help but be kinda creeped out by Hillary’s piercing stare in her profile image. But maybe it’s just me. Then there’s Mitt Romney’s profile, which lists a recent message from a self-proclaimed Christian/Gothic/Electronica band called “The Rapture Right.” No telling if it’s serious or not. Either way, this sorta thing could turn off potential voters.

And how’s this for weird? Rudy Giuliani’s profile page is private! That means only those privileged enough to be invited can view it. Strange for a guy who’s open enough to parade around in a dress in public….