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The latest social media fad in Kerala is to add the badge of a political party to Facebook profile picture to show one’s political affiliation as Assembly elections draw near.
Facebook has introduced the ‘badge’ feature only recently. Badges are symbols that can be worn on top of pictures.
People use badges to promote their ideas, activities, interests and events.
Job made easy
Manually adding a political badge is a tedious process. But a group of students has developed an app ‘MyParty2016.in’ that helps to complete the job in a jiffy.
Manzoor Samad and Ashwin Philip, final year students of Mangalam College of Engineering, Ettumanoor, Kerala, teamed up with Jijo John from the Fanshawe University, Canada, to develop the app.
Sujai Pillai, a MyGov ambassador under the Digital India initiative and founder of 2tion.com, acted as the mentor.
“With the app, one minute is all it takes to show party allegiance on Facebook,” Samad and Pillai told BusinessLine here.
First instance
It not only helps users to add party colours to profile pictures but also generate ‘live’ results (proxy for likely votes) in terms of number of supporters for each party in the fray.
This is the first time that the 'badge' feature is being used on Facebook profile pictures for regional elections in India, Pillai said.
Over 10,000 users have updated their profiles using this app within two days of launch, Pillai told BusinessLine .
The electoral options listed out on the app are LDF (CPI(M)-led Left Democratic Front), UDF (Congress-led United Democratic Front), and NDA (BJP-led National Democratic Alliance).
Raised interest
A fourth, NOTA (none of the above), is also featured for others. In this manner www.myparty2016.in provides live details of supporters of each party.
Developers expect more Facebook users to flaunt the badge in the coming days.
Last days of the campaign may give a clearer picture of the political affiliation of social media users with the number of subscribers expected to rise into lakhs, Pillai said.
According to him, political parties in Kerala are showing an increased interest in Facebook, Twitter and Whatsapp which allow candidates reach directly to voters.
Selfies (photos with voters) too have become a rage among new generation politicians.
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