In The Press
In 2007, BlackPlanet was featured in the press when the U.S. Department of Defense or the Pentagon banned it amongst other sites in order to free up bandwidth, suggesting high usage levels. Banned sites were youtube.com, pandora.com, photobucket.com, myspace.com, live365.com, hi5.com, metacafe.com, mtv.com, ifilm.com, blackplanet.com, stupidvideos.com and filecabi.com. The Defense network contains more than 15,000 local and regional networks and more than five million computers in the grid.
BlackPlanet gained considerable publicity when then-Senator Barack Obama began using the site on October 5, 2007, during his presidential campaign bid. Within 10 days, he had gained nearly 200,000 friends. Over 2/3 of BlackPlanet's online community stated their intention to vote in the 2008 election in an online poll conducted by the site itself. The media perceived this move into a niche social networking tool to be a 'smart move' by the Senator. On March 30, 2011, President Obama had 450,579 friends on BlackPlanet. The page continues to be updated with regular blog posts, but does not feature recent status updates.
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