Just in time for tonight's first presidential debate (which, as we just learned, will indeed take place), Twitter has launched an election themed site that tracks all the political tweets on the service. Twitter regularly determines a set of 'Hot Election Topics' and displays every tweet that fits into these categories in a automatically updating stream. While this is definitely a compelling way to use Twitter, we can't help but wonder if Twitter will bring some of the features of this site to other parts of the service.
Politweets, of course, has been providing a similar service for quite a while already, but its scope is limited to just filtering out tweets with the candidates' names in it. Twitter, on the other hand, uses a constantly changing set of keywords, which makes it far more dynamic.
The most compelling feature of Twitter's election site is actually quite simple: the automatically updating stream. That's one feature we have always missed on our regular Twitter homepages and also one of the most compelling reason to use a desktop client instead of Twitter's site.
The value of a service like this is often not so much in the content of a single tweet, but in the aggregation and real-time view of the discussion. Even Twitter's Summize-based search does not update automatically. We have started to use Monitter to track Twitter conversations when there is a breaking news story because it updates automatically.
In addition, as Josh Catone points out, Twitter sits on a goldmine of similar information that it is not putting to good use yet. Now that they have this infrastructure in place, Twitter could easily create similar sites for other events, or even allow its users to create their own Twitter-based memetrackers in the future.
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good topic!!!
Posted by: xacan | September 26, 2008 9:54 AM
http://election.twitter.com is overwhelming, not very useful IMHO. Flood of info, thought bubbles on McCain, Palin, Biden Obama does what?
Social Media Club welcomes all citizen-generated content (Text, audio, video, images) at http://someelection08.ning.com
Posted by: Adam Zand | September 26, 2008 10:02 AM
I hope so. It's a good example of what you can so with a highly focused data mashup. All it's missing is the Google map.
Posted by: Mark Bean
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September 26, 2008 10:11 AM
I am getting tired of Twitter. ReadWriteWeb.com should be changed to ReadWriteTwitter.com.
Posted by: Max | September 26, 2008 10:20 AM
Frederic, this looks like a testing ground for a Twitter grouping feature. Do you have any opinions on this? For example, have you tried making @replies within the site? By the time you typed half your reply, the original tweet as scrolled out of view. And even if you do make a quick reply, tracking conversations isn't really possible, either - well, not without going elsewhere (but we're used to this with conventional Twitter usage). All the grouping apps we've seen before have been built on threaded conversations, this is quite different. I don't doubt the potential, though.
Posted by: Neil | September 26, 2008 10:28 AM
It's a little digg at digg, isn't it? I think it's cool, tho who tweets from the browser anymore?
perhaps they can even tag up the terms so that we can see by size what's going up and what's going down.
scratch that, use red for what's going down.
;-)
Posted by: Adrian Chan
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September 26, 2008 12:31 PM
Frederic:
I thought that the automatic updating feature was compelling, too -- until I actually tried to use Election.Twitter.com during the debate on Friday night. I got a headache. There were just *so* many updates about the candidates that the auto-updates were happening too fast. I couldn't keep track. I used Search.Twitter.com instead. It allowed me to refresh on my own terms.
Maybe this new election interface could give us the option to turn auto updating on or off?
--Bryan Person
LiveWorld social media evangelist
Posted by: Bryan Person, LiveWorld | September 29, 2008 7:25 AM