Thursday, July 07, 2011

Traffic crashes Ma’s new page

By Chris Wang / Staff Reporter

President Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) campaign headquarters launched its first Facebook message application for his re-election campaign, but the system was quickly overloaded with traffic and crashed within 30 minutes of its launch.

The application, named “Early Birds,” allowed users to “punch in” every morning between 6am and 10:30am to leave messages, campaign spokeswoman Lee Chia-fei (李佳霏) said. The office is working to correct the problem, but it is unclear when the application will be relaunched, she said.

The office took over operation of Ma’s Facebook fanpage on Saturday, she said, adding that it has more than 680,000 fans.

“The ‘Early Birds’ was the first of a series of social media applications the office will launch in an attempt to reach out to young voters and Internet users,” she said.

Compared with the 2008 presidential election campaign, Ma’s team is putting more effort into boosting its Internet communications, a battleground generally seen to favor the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), which began utilizing the Internet earlier than the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) did.

Meanwhile, DPP spokesman Chen Chi-mai (陳其邁) said Ma has always tried to prove he is Web-savvy to appeal to younger voters.

However, as a national leader, Ma needs to focus on the wellbeing and livelihood of the people and development of the country rather than waking up early to check his Facebook site, Chen said.

Ma’s main challenger in the election, DPP Chairperson Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文), has yet to announce any major Internet activities.