After helping to found the hit Web site Facebook Inc. with two Harvard roommates, Chris Hughes took a leave of absence from the social-networking phenomenon to work for another kind of rising star: presidential hopeful Barack Obama. According to a profile of Hughes that ran in The Wall Street Journal this weekend, the 23-year-old spends 14-hour days figuring out how to leverage Web 2.0 technologies to foster grass-roots fundraising and how to involve more deeply the 65,000 people who have registered on the campaign site in the Illinois senator's bid for the White House. The project is not without limits — supporters can't post much more than a photo and a favorite quote — and not without controversy, as the campaign recently killed a MySpace page created by a supporter over concerns about liability. Nevertheless, about 5,000 groups of Obama supporters use the site's online tools, which include flyers and video downloads of speeches, to create their own events and fundraisers around the country. Hughes continues to experiment with ways to bring the campaign to the Internet, such as a new interactive map that shows where supporters are gathering for Obama during his national "Walk for Change" event. Hughes told the Journal he took a "significant" pay cut to work for Obama, but he said that he retains an ownership stake and stock options in Facebook, which in April took in $25 million from investors including Accel Partners and Greylock Partners.—Mary Kathleen Flynn
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