Obama's iPhone app is an excellent mobility mashup

The Obama campaign released an official iPhone application last week.  The application is developed by a team of developers led by Raven Zachary. It has a chokeful of useful features for Obama fans. But what caught my eye is the way the app mashs up voice calls with web and social features.

At the bottom of the app's start page, there is a small "donate" button. When you click on it, it actually makes a phone call to connect you to an operator to make the donation. That really leverages the voice infrastructure the campaign already built, and beat the typical  enter-your-credit-card-number approach by a large margin. 

Then, another cool feature is that the app organize your contacts in the address book into a priority list with "battle ground state" residents listed at the top. It even encourages you to call those friends by keeping track of the calls you made, and compare you against other people! (Well, guess I do not know many people in battle ground states!)

Of course, none of those features are revolutionary on its own. But they really show how voice mashup can improve user experience. I'd like to see many more iPhone applications utilizing the voice features! It is a "phone" after all!