Twitter Sheds Light on Election; 98% of Twitter loves Obama
September 30, 2008 – 10:10 am by Griffin HammondA couple cool items from the Twitter blog:
1) Twitter has launched an Election 2008 page, your one-stop shop to see what people are saying about the hottest trends in the election world. If you’ve used Twitter Search, you could find these online conversations for yourself, but Twitter’s new page serves it all up nicely.
The top of the page shows topics trending the most in relation to the election. (“Tina Fey” is number 3 right now.) Also featured are Barack Obama and John McCain’s Twitter feeds, always interesting if you’ve never taken a look. (Poor Ralph Nader - apparently the same rules for presidential debates apply to the Twitter Election page. You’re not allowed.)
The rest of the page shows the latest tweets which mention McCain, Obama, Palin, or Biden, and you can filter by candidate. You can also offer an election-related update of your own. According to their blog entry, they will also feature notable election Twitterers soon.
2) Twitter produced an interesting chart (right) which tracked political conversation points during last week’s presidential debate. From 6:00 to 7:38 p.m. (Pacific), you can see when Twitter users responded to what the candidates said, with major spikes in “tax,” “Iraq,” “Iran,” then “Korea.”
It’s important to note that Obama appears to have a significant edge with voters who also twitter. Obama has 88,785 followers on Twitter compared to McCain’s 1,561 and Nader’s 144. That’s a whopping 98.1% for Obama, only 1.7% for McCain, and a measley 0.02% for Nader. While number of Twitter followers is hardly scientific, clearly Twitter updates are not representitive of the broad political dialogue.
