Nine Ways to Tweet the Election
If you aren’t yet tired of hearing about the US presidential election, you have plenty of web options to get another dose of information. News sites will certainly be bouncing, but Twitter is already overflowing with ways to experience the election, no matter which candidate you support. In addition to the tools we mentioned earlier, here’s a breakdown for using Twitter to track the latest election-related tweets.
Drink from the firehose
If more is better, you need to keep your browser open to Twitter’s official election stream, which updates about once per second.
Using a non-iPhone mobile device? You might prefer Slandr’s election Tweet stream. It doesn’t auto-update and has fewer updates than the official version, but it’s still got plenty of eletion-ness.
The more advanced could choose their own keywords and use Twitter search to track the election terms of most interest. For example, track #votereport to see whether there are problem’s at the polls, or Ben & Jerry’s to see who’s getting free ice cream.
Vote for real, then vote for fake
It’s an understatement to say Twitter leans toward Obama. If you’d still like to add your voice to an inaccurate sampling, you can vote in TwitVote, a “mock opinion poll,” with emphasis on the mock. Currently the votes, which require a Twitter login, favor Obama six to one.
Similarly, a Twitter election map is entirely blue. The project uses “a few algorithms that parse many tweets for certain content,” then uses the location in the user’s profile. It’s a neat idea and a glimpse of who would win in a Twitter election. But expect more red states to show up on network maps tonight.
Follow the campaign parties
Yes, you can find both McCain and Obama on Twitter, though don’t expect to hear much from them. McCain hasn’t tweeted in over a week and Obama’s account is in full get-out-the-vote mode.
There are a couple places you can listen in on the campaign parties tonight, which should give an idea of the mood amongst each candidates closest supporters.
Obama randomly selected an active Twitter user to sit in the front row at his speech tonight in Chicago. Luckily that guy is also a Rails coder, so he naturally created a site for his tweets from the front row. Regardless of tonight’s outcome, expect heavy volume from Bruce Williams and his guest Damon Clinkscales.
Unfortunately, there isn’t the equivalent site for John McCain’s campaign, but a Twitter search for Biltmore, the hotel where McCain supporters will be, is already returning some results.
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