Twitter and Politics

Politics are a big topic on Twitter just like they are on social networks, forums and chat rooms. Hopefully, they don’t have as many flame wars on Twitter as web forums have. A new website called Politweets is showcasing some of the political tweets with Democrats on the left in Republicans on the right. that may help measure candidate popularity — think of it as a political buzz tracker. Politweets was created by Character140, the folks who created Twittertale.com.

Politweets rose up from all the great publicity twittertale got (and is still getting). We knew we had to take the same technology and use it for something a little more practical. Dan Croak of thoughtbot reached out with an concept to track the presidential election. that was one of the many ideas we had come up with but now that citizens were asking for it, we put it on top of the priority list. There was a definite need and I wanted to be the one to help supply that solution to the twitter users. Dan plus offered his rail’s expertise to help us get it out the door quickly (in date for the New hampshire primary). In three short days we came up

with the concept, designed and delivered a product that we are all very proud of. that evening we made some minor tweaks, one being a better iphone experience (in case any one out on the trail needs up to term info), another in preparation for next steps/features.

The tweets posted on the PoliTweets come from any Twitter user who
mentions one of the candidates names. There are additionally many
news Twitters dedidicated to politics such as Politics, RedState, techRepublican and PolitcalLunch.

Some of the candidates themselves plus have Twitters including Barack Obama (6,667 followers), John Edwards (4,148 followers), Fred Thompson (816 followers), Ron Paul (685 followers) and Joe Biden (120 followers). Hillary Clinton’s campaign has a possible Twitter here but it isn’t active. John McCain doesn’t have a Twitter but there is a Blogs4McCain Twitter. Mike Huckabee doesn’t have an official Twitter (yet) but there is a Huckablog supporting him. John Edwards’ has thousands of Twitter followers but uncommonly hasn’t updated his Twitter in a month. A relatively unheard of candidate named Keith Sprankle additionally has a Twitter detail at sprankle2008.

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