Regardless of the fate of Barack Obama's presidential campaign, he'll have cemented his prominence in the party for years to come. And he'll have done it through Facebook.

Don't buy it? Bloomberg has the goods:

Almost 2 million people have entered personal information on Obama pages on social-networking Web sites such as Facebook, MySpace and his campaign's mybarackobama.com, offering home addresses, phone numbers, their views on specific issues and the names of friends. The data have allowed Obama, 46, to raise more than $200 million, fill sports arenas with supporters across the nation and motivate millions more with custom-tailored messages.

"It's gigantic,'' said Laura Quinn, chief executive officer of Catalist, a company that maintains a database of 280 million Americans. The list is as "transformational'' as the advent of political advertising, she said.

By persuading people to enter personal information directly on his campaign's Web site, something no major candidate has ever attempted, Obama could provide "a gold mine of information and access to potential donors." Bill McIntyre, executive vice president of Grassroots Enterprise Inc., a Washington-based Internet marketing firm that advises campaigns, told Bloomberg the list could be worth as much as $200 million and the institutionalized donor network could far surpass the GOP program of the '80s and '90s.

Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes has been running the show:

Obama's success stems from a decision early in his campaign to embrace the concept of social networking, allowing him to leap ahead of his Democratic rival, Senator Hillary Clinton of New York, or the presumptive Republican nominee, Senator John McCain of Arizona. For example, Obama now has 790,000 Facebook "friends," compared with 150,000 for Clinton, 60, and 117,000 for McCain, 71.

Mybarackobama.com, the first social network specifically devoted to a political campaign, is modeled on Facebook. Chris Hughes, a 24-year-old Facebook co-founder, has been a fulltime Obama campaign worker for more than a year and helped develop the candidate's site.

Chalk this up as yet another example of how the Obama campaign has, organizationally speaking, stayed one step ahead of its rivals.