WAVERLY - Joining Barack Obama's presidential campaign was not a difficult decision for Chris Hughes.

The 23-year old co-founder of the online social networking Web site Facebook left his post as spokesman for his company and signed on as the online organizing guru for the Illinois senator.

"When I made the decision to come to the campaign in February, it just felt like one of those things I had to do," Hughes said as he addressed the Wartburg Democrats club at the Cardinal Commons on the campus of Wartburg College Wednesday.

Hughes, a native of Hickory, N.C., and his two dorm mates at Harvard, Mark Zuckerberg and Dustin Moskovitz, created Facebook in 2004. The original intention of Facebook, said Hughes, was to "build a system that had real, verifiable information that could be traced back to the real world," unlike other social networking sites where information is often falsified.

Facebook initially was available only to fellow students at Harvard, but it soon branched out to other colleges, then to high school students, and is now open to anyone with an e-mail address. The site now has approximately 45 million members, according to Hughes.

"None of us expected it to take off like it has," said Hughes.

Now Hughes is taking his social networking know-how and applying it to the campaign of the charismatic Obama. The Web site My.BarackObama.com is the latest brainchild of Hughes. It is similar to Facebook in that My.BarackObama brings Obama supporters together in an online community to organize events and fund raisers for the democratic hopeful.

"What's really similar and fascinating is that they (Facebook and My.BarackObama) are both powered by people," said Hughes.

Along with the Web site, Hughes developed a Facebook application called Obama that allows users to share content with their friends ranging from videos of the senator to news stories to blog posts. In fact, all of the campaign media can be found within the application, said Hughes, and users can rate the media to bring the most popular pieces to the forefront.

With all of his work on Obama's online campaign, Hughes dismissed the conception that Internet campaigns have not been successful in the state of Iowa. "I don't really buy the notion that Iowans don't use the Internet," said Hughes, who noted that there were approximately 300,000 members on Facebook who list Iowa as their home state.

He did concede that Iowa was different from other states in terms of its access to presidential candidates. He informally polled the crowd of about 20 students and found nearly half had met Obama in person. "This is probably the only state where that many people could have met a presidential candidate," said Hughes.

The Facebook co-founder declined to comment on Wednesday's announcement that Facebook and New York City Attorney General Andrew Cuomo had reached an agreement to settle a child safety probe dealing with the site. Hughes said he had not heard the news as of Wednesday afternoon.

Contact Drew Andersen at (319) 291-1418 or drew.andersen@wcfcourier.com.