As reported by David All last week, Myspace has launched its politics portal - Myspace Impact. And you know what? There isn't much to write about. The Impact channel feels like little more than a hastily-thrown-together [1] landing page for "official" candidate profiles.

And perhaps that's the greatest value of the page - with so many profiles purporting to represent the candidate, having a Myspace-approved page from which people can find the "real" candidate profile is necessary. At the same time, the page delivers PSA-like content, a beneath-the-fold voter registration function, and a good bit of advertising for the Myspace Impact Awards. The page also features non-profit job listings, and an feed of news stories about the presidential candidates. In its current state, this page isn't a destination page by any stretch of the imagination, though I'd put good money on the fact this page will become more of a destination as we march toward 2008.

And of course, the most important feature is missing. As reported, the site will act as a jump-off for candidate fundraising efforts. This is uncharted territory for social networking services, and may prove to be one of the defining stories of the 2008 race. With Myspace owning the dominant share of the SNS market, if candidates can effectively design fund-raising destinations and widgets, the potential is enormous. We're not talking about mailing list of a few million people - we're talking about a site with over 164M accounts. And as a majority of young people maintain their primary SNS identity on Myspace, it is clearly the best-bet vehicle for reaching this audience.

[1] At the time of this writing, the "Myspace Impact" hyperlink in the top navbar points to http://stage-dev1.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=impact