Twitter's a force in the election

As the election approaches, I think we all can agree, regardless of whether our hearts bleed red or blue, that Twitter has had a significant impact on politics in campaign 2008. Of course, Barack Obama is the most popular person on Twitter. But beyond that, Twitter has had a dramatic impact on giving people a voice this year. Twitter implemented Election.twitter.com and it's been captivating. Tuesday night, the tweets will be moving so quickly that it will be hard to read, sort of like the stock ticker in October. Hopefully, with a better result for you.

The Twitter Vote Report seeks to monitor activity and protect from irregularities at all polling places. According to the vote report, "Millions of Americans will be voting this Election Day. Many of these voters will have terrific experiences and we’d love to hear about those. But many voters will experience voting problems that we have been hearing about for years: long lines, broken machines, and registered voters who can’t vote because their names aren’t showing up on the registration rolls.

Using Twitter Vote Report, voters will be able to share their experiences and resources with one another (e.g. “#wait:120″ meaning that the wait time is 120 minutes). These messages will then be aggregated and mapped so that we can “see” voting problems around the country in real-time."

This election season has seen the integration of Mainstream media with Twitter. Current TV will be displaying selected content from Twitter users who use the hashtag, #current, on air. In addition, their website will not only show the #current tweets, but allow users to vote for content, digg-style. We've seen how CNN has incorporated the Twitter feed into its coverage during the debates and hurricanes with Rick Sanchez. I am sure we will see similar coverage on Tuesday night.

Last week, Mark McKinnon of Internet Evolution wrote in Twitter's Role in Digital Democracy, how Twitter was filling an important gap in digital democracy by acting as the Town Hall and being an expressive medium for citizens to engage in our government. The article demonstrates how people have been given a real voice in the electoral process. All of these posts and sites can be found in my delicious political twitter tags, politicaltweets.

We get our news first on Twitter and Tuesday night, I am sure we will get election news first as well. Will you be watching Twitter and these sites to stay in the know?

Happy Voting!

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Election 2008 Debate: And the winner is....

Twitter's election site was fantastic last night.  Tweets were flying by, positive and negative, Obama and McCain. Twitter handled it flawlessly.  In fact, things moved so quickly, sometimes it was hard to keep up.  Here's a few samples of what you said:

 

  

  

  

  

Buddy Brewer said it best, congrats to the Twitter team!

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Reminder about tonight's debate

Earlier this week, I posted about Friday's debate and Jeremiah's debate scoring game.  As a reminder, the post is listed below.  But alot has changed in the fast moving world of Twitter since then.

• We had the whole #suspending controversy and a fun meme on Twitter that is still going on
• Twitter introduced Election 2008, an election filtered twitter feed 
• And as a result, numerous people have provided great insight into the tool and its meaning:
• Joseph Jaffe gives the election feed a Twen 
• Bryan Person is impressed by the new site. 
• Nicholas Carlson of ValleyWag describes the site with an animated 40 second video of people's tweets.
  
•  Laura Porto Stockwell provided her thoughts on Twitter's Election 2008, calling it a news ticker by the people.
• Frederic Lardinois of ReadWriteWeb points out that perhaps the election site is a sign of things to come.
• Don Reisinger of TechCrunch suggests that Twitter should go beyond the mashups to create groups to extend the functionality to create a much more robust Twitter experience. 
• And very interestingly, Jennifer Leggio points out that perhaps this is how Twitter will monetize itself.
  

. Personally, I agree with many of the writers above. I think the election site is a great way to tap into the audience's appetite for all things electoral.  It is most definitely a test of more group-oriented experiential feeds and quite possibly how Twitter will generate revenue, either via ads, sponsored groups, or something else.  And one more thing, before I forget, don't forget to tune in tonight and keep one eye on the TV and one eye on Twitter.
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The first of 4 Presidential debates will be held on Friday, September 26, 2008 at 9PM Eastern. with domestic policy focus from the campus of The University of Mississippi, Oxford, MS.

You may recall last February's Super Bowl when Jeremiah Owyang organized a fun side-game where we all rated the commercials on Twitter. Well, Jeremiah has a great idea to utilize Twitter to rate the debates in a similar fashion.  Be the Armchair political analyst and use Twitter to Score the Debate has all of the details and scoring examples.  It should make the debates even more enjoyable and meaningful.  Let's hope that Twitter is up to the task and the Fail Whale does not appear.

Tuesday night, Twitter was the winner

Tuesday was a very exciting evening with the final primary results and all of the candidate speeches. But what made it so dramatic for me was the conversation in the twitter community. These national events demonstrate the value of twitter and strength of its community. There were over 1500 Obama oriented tweets according to Summize (over 100 pages). Forrester’s Jeremiah Owyang wrote a tremendous piece in his Web Strategy blog today that includes several interesting charts and graphs of twitter activity all using a diverse set of free twitter tools (a subject for another day). Clearly, twitter land is Obama country. . But regardless of your candidate, it was a fun night. The banter, the insight, the blog links was fantastic. At the end of the night, most people tweeted that their hands hurt from too much typing. We’ve experienced this fun before during the Super Bowl, the Academy Awards, and even Super Tuesday. Each time, I’ve walked away, thinking wow, that was a blast. Twittering during a big national event, is like watching the event with your family, in your living room and as Jeff Pulver says, in your social media living room.

And even with the increased volume, twitter never hiccupped, Fudgie the whale never arrived. As described earlier, it was a great night--twitter was the big winner!