For the last couple of years we’ve been helping clients with a wide range of Twitter engagement tools. We’ve helped non-profits, political campaigns, and businesses identify and engage with the best Twitter accounts to help spread their message. Now we’ve committed our efforts to a free site that helps progressives unite for political action. UniteBlue.com […]
Watch democracy and Twitter evolve together
Twitter and politics are a natural combination. Politicians love getting their message directly to their constituents, and Twitter is the perfect vehicle. Journalists also love Twitter, and picking up tweets and turning them into stories is a great writing aid for any reporter. Tweets were important in the 2010 elections, but they will dominate the race for 2012. Join me as I dig into this fascinating exercise in public speech and democracy in action.
This week we got crushed by the State of the Union speech. We normally get about 30,000 to 50,000 tweets per day in the 2012twit.com database, and our largest server can handle that without any showing any appreciable load. During the SOTU tweet volume exploded. We got 500,000 tweets in about 4 hours. I was […]
Our work with Twitter and politics has now moved beyond the 2012 election. We just set up a tweet collection database to track the Occupy Wall Street movement. It uses the 140dev framework to collect all tweets containing #ows, #occupy, and #occupywalllstreet. This will be used to document our tools and methodology to automate a […]
A lot of my Twitter consulting for clients has involved automating the process of Twitter engagement. Now I’m finally documenting this as part of the Twitter politics work I’m doing with my son. We are building up a political account called @4more, and writing up the whole process on our 140elect.com blog.
I’ve been quiet here for the last couple of months as I’ve worked on a new Twitter dashboard for the 2012 presidential election. We launched it last night at http://2012twit.com, and I’m very pleased with the result. This will be a lot of fun. I’ll be blogging here about development issues related to the site. […]
The 2012 candidate system is going to need a more fault tolerant collection system. Since the Egyptian protest started Twitter has been even more unreliable, and this is affecting the connection to the streaming API. I use a monitoring system to warn me when tweet collection has stopped, but it hasn’t been necessary in the […]
I’m collecting all the tweets for possible 2012 candidates with the Streaming API, and I wanted to make sure I was getting every one of their tweets. I built a backfilling script to go through every tweet in each of these accounts, and add any that weren’t already in the database. This uses the /statuses/user_timeline […]
I’ve built a tweet aggregation database for the 2012 election, and I’m using the streaming API to collect all tweets for the possible candidates. I want to go a lot further than just collecting their tweets, though. I think there will be all kinds of fascinating data to mine from the way these Twitter accounts […]
Two groups on Twitter that have been ignoring each other are about to collide, and it won’t be pretty when they do. Politicians from world Presidents to American Congressmen have embraced Twitter over the last year, and now hacktivists are using Twitter to manage and promote the Wikileaks cyberwar. They are operating side by side, […]
I’m saving this tweet from Russian President Medvedev so I can point to it the next time I read an article pontificating on what Twitter should become. Twitter doesn’t have to become anything, it already is. Twitter is a tool that lets the President of Russia cut through any filters and communicate with anyone he […]
In a delightful juxtaposition of the technical and political aspects of Twitter, the top Twitter politicians are finding themselves with obsolete screen names. As The Hill points out, Nancy Pelosi tweets from @speakerpelosi, which will no longer be a correct description come January. Ironically, although it is technically possible to change screen names in Twitter, […]
I hadn’t heard the term “dissent entrepreneur” before I read this blog post by Aaron Peters, but I love it. Entrepreneurship is an established set of behaviors in the business and technology worlds. It would be great to see it applied to politics. Twitter politics is as much about political activism as campaigning by party […]
