election.twitter
Twitter is traditionally a place where people tell other people (that care) about what they are doing/thinking/seeing, etc. Basically a fairly flippant local/global “what’s happening now”. So it’s a little weird of Twitter to launch a relatively serious service monitoring the US Election, right?
election.twitter.com works by filtering hundreds of relevant Twitter updates ‘real-time’ to create a source that gathers public opinion about the presidential election. It’s a new(ish) way for you to share your thoughts on a topical item, and an excellent place to check out the zeitgeist of the election. If you’re are a twitter user, you can join the discussion by posting directly from the site, your Tweet not only goes to everyone who follows you, but to the automatically updating election time line (not unlike a chat room type set-up).
Politweets has been providing a similar service for a while already, but it has a limited filtering system. Twitter, on the other hand, uses a constantly changing set of keywords, which makes it more dynamic. Performing real-time algorithmic analysis on millions of unedited public reactions. election.twitter determines a set of ‘Hot Topics’ and displays any tweet that fits into those categories - creating a live ticker of continuously fresh opinion. Twitter’s Summize-based search does a similar job, only not automatically and not to a ‘live’ stream.
People have already started to use services like Monitter to track Twitter conversations, when there is a breaking news story, because again it updates automatically. The obvious value of a service like this is not so much in what’s being said in each tweet, but in the aggregation of opinion and the real-time view of global conversation.
As more and more people use Twitter, the company sits on an ever increasing goldmine of information and opinion. Now that they have the infrastructure in place, Twitter could easily create similar services for any event, or even allow its users to create their own Twitter-based memetrackers. As they so proudly say: ‘Twitter is the pulse of what is happening with the people, organizations, and events you care about—delivered immediately, wherever you are.’ This has finally proved compelling, shared events ranging from earthquakes to film festivals have already been covered, and now Twitter has introduced an engaging way to participate in democracy.
No longer quite so flippant…..
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