One of the great supposed achievements of the 2008 presidential race was that President Obama and the Democratic Party gained a formidable political weapon: the most detailed databases ever amassed on the views and voting habits of registered U.S. voters. Obama had deployed social technologies on a grand scale. And Democrats were said to be ahead of Republicans in deploying distributed volunteers to make Web-enabled phone-bank calls.

During such calls, volunteers could fill out online forms, building files on each John and Jane Doe--who they said they voted for, what issues moved them. In the two months before the 2008 elections, the Democratic National Committee (DNC) added 223 million new pieces of data on voters, giving the DNC ten times the amount of data they'd had in the 2004 campaign. (That's what Voter Activation Network, a company based in Somerville, MA that builds front-end software for DNC database, told me after Obama won.)

All this data was supposed have allowed the delivery of powerful customized pitches to voters in future elections.

So where was all of this on Tuesday? Massachusetts is not a presidential battleground state, so relatively less outreach and data-gathering was done in 2008. Also, Democrats no longer have a lock on social media (if they ever had it in the first place). While John McCain may not have been much of an Internet candidate, Senator-elect Scott Brown demonstrated Obama-like facility with the likes of Twitter, Facebook, Flickr and YouTube. Attention from national pressure groups, saturation TV ads, and robo-calls from current and former presidents tended to drown out everything else. And in the final analysis, some campaigns may be beyond technological help.

Everyone knows that online conversations happen fast, but Ilya Grigorik, CTO and founder of PostRank, a company that tracks online conversations around pieces of content, shared some interesting concrete numbers this afternoon at Defrag 2009, a technology conference taking place in Denver. Grigorik randomly selected 100,000 posts that the company had tracked and calculated when conversation happened around them.

It's no surprise that 80 percent of engagement around a post happens on day one, and that 60 percent of that happens within the first hour. What was surprising, however, is that this is actually a decrease from the numbers Grigorik has for 2007. According to his data from two years ago, 95 percent of engagement happened on the first day, and 90 percent of that was within the first hour.

These numbers seem strange considering that the Web appears to be operating at a faster pace. Grigorik's numbers show, for example, that about on average 66 percent of the conversation around a post happens on "chatter" channels such as Twitter, which is nearly the opposite of the trend two years ago, when most conversation happened on the site where a post was published.

Grigorik said he thinks the explanation lies in the effect of the strength of weak ties. He believes that online conversation has become so distributed that it takes time for information to filter out to every social group that's going to talk about it. If he's right, it's a ray of hope for the real-time Web.

On the surface, it might appear that more real-time streams will lead to a stream of data that appears and disappears, leaving no time to ponder the meaning of any of it. If Grigorik is right, however, real-time streams and the social infrastructure around them may help information find its way to more people who would be interested in discussing it.

A screenshot from RockMelt.com

Rumors surfaced yesterday of a new "Facebook browser" called RockMelt, with a star-studded cast of backers and employees that includes Netscape founder Marc Andreessen and Blake Ross and Joe Hewitt of Firefox fame.

There are no clear reports yet of what the Facebook browser would be like, but it's unlikely to be a simple Facebook client and I doubt that such smart people would simply copy an existing "social" Web browsers such as Flock.

What RockMelt may be is a fully realized version of Facebook Connect. The basic idea of this service is to let developers integrate enable their users to interact with Facebook friends on their site, without having to create new accounts. It provides readymade social features for any site, without giving users the burden of having to rebuild their own network from scratch.

I interviewed Facebook senior platform manager Dave Morin around the time Facebook Connect was released, and I remember how far-reaching the vision for that service seemed to be. Morin imagined a type of dynamic connection between friends extending across the Web.

Right now, however, Facebook Connect can only be used when a developer integrates it. RockMelt might make it possible to access the service anywhere, creating a constant social connection while browsing. RockMelt could also be built so that users can interact with friends who are logged into Facebook.com, gradually drawing them off the site and onto the Web.

If it's true that current Facebook staff are also working on RockMelt (as was reported), it's even more likely that RockMelt will be an extension of the company's radical vision of a more social Web.