Politweets Helps Keep Track of Political Tweets

Posted on January 10, 2008

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. This may help measure candidate popularity -- think of it as a political tweet tracker built using the Twitter API. Politweets was created by Character140, the people who created Twittertale.com.

The company says, "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 idea to track the presidential election. This was one of the many ideas we had come up with but now that people 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 provide that solution to the twitter users."

The tweets posted on the PoliTweets come from any Twitter user who mentions one of the candidates names. There are also many news Twitters dedicated to politics such as @RedState and @PolitcalLunch.

Some of the candidates themselves also have Twitters including Barack Obama, John Edwards, Fred Thompson and Joe Biden. Hillary Clinton also now has a Twitter with frequent updates, @hillaryclinton.