I'm a subscriber of Barack Obama's text message alerts and have been impressed by how the campaign makes use of it so far. The messages usually alert subscribers to current events, like "Watch Barack speak from Berlin at approx 1pm ET. The speech will be live on CNN & streamed at http://barackobama.com/live. Please fwd this msg.". The advantage of sms over email is clearly that it alerts or reminds subscribers immediately, while they might not check their emails until later. I was fascinated to hear the news that the campaign would first announce Obama's running mate via text message in order to grow their pool of subscribers. And even though it turned out the news was leaked by CNN first and the exclusivity of the hastingly created sms two hours afterwards was lost, the campaign now has more than 3 million text message subscribers (according to this source), which might prove to be helpful going into crunchtime. Read a more in-depth discussion about the edge that text messaging might give Barack Obama in the upcoming elections >>