Twitter Election 2008 Site Powered By You
Sep 26th, 2008 | By James Lewin | Category: Citizen Media 
Twitter has announced a new site, election.twiter.com, that tracks Twitter conversations of politics in real time.
During the first presidential debate in Oxford, Mississippi and each subsequent debate leading up to and beyond election day, Twitter plans to perform real-time algorithmic analysis on millions of unedited public reactions.Â
The site is addictive and it should be even more so during the debates.
Features:
- Hot Election Topics are determined by a variety of search queries
- The topics at the top of the page are updated every 15 minutes
- Clicking at topic filters the content based on that particular word or phrase
- Obama and McCain’s Twitter accounts are updated whenever they update
- People can participate in the box under “What do you think?”
- The main timeline is a live ticker—new updates appear every second or so
- Clicking the sidebar tabs filters the main timeline by candidate name
- We’ll be featuring notable Twitter accounts in the sidebar
- Updates made at Twitter E08 will link back to election.twitter.com
While Twitter’s Election 2008 site is cool, even more important is that Twitter seems to have moved beyond the growing pains that plagued it for a year, and is now building new and interesting functionality on top of its platform.
I’d love to see Twitter on something like Apple TV, so you could watch the debates while tracking Twitter discussions on screen, too.Â
The Election 2008 site demonstrates a new type of real time citizen media and shows how Twitter, with some backend crunching, has unique potential.Â
Also check out this new Twitter tracker called Fresh Squeezed Tweets- http://anorangeamerica.com/
We rolled this out for Tropicana just as the polls opened on election morning at New Media Strategies.
It pulls Tweets in real time, crunches the numbers and displays the connections between conversations with some pretty cool graphics. Election may be over, but its got some fascinating stuff there to look at, especially now. Give it a look…