Do you talk about politics? Do you share opinions on Twitter? If your answer to both questions is “yes”, then your tweets are helping to drive analysis of the political landscape. Twitter is calling their new project the Twitter Political Index, or Twindex. It works by searching out all the public tweets about each candidate, and analyzing how positive or negative they are.
To be sure, the results, which are updated every day, are not meant to replace polls of actual voters. For example, polls weight their results according to demographics. But there is some evidence that political inclination among Twitter users isn’t quite representative of the real world (see section 4 of this very interesting study on the intersection of Twitter and politics). So think of the Twindex as an optional, supplemental perspective. It’s a real-time glimpse of what millions of regular people are saying about Obama and Romney, as well how they’re saying it.
What do you think? Will this ongoing analysis of the Twitterverse provide fresh and exciting insights into Campaign 2012? Or is this just another layer of noise amidst an ocean of data? Tell us how it is using the comment box below.
For more, here’s Mashable last week – http://mashable.com/2012/09/03/twitter-political-index/
Cosmic Revolutions 
Your link is to an article that is well-worth reading. I was interested (and somewhat surprised) to see that right-leaning Twitter users are more active. Not sure how to interpret all this. Still, intriguing. Thanks!
Interestingly, the study also suggests that Twitter users in general skew to the left, even though conservative tweeters tend to be more active. I assume there are a variety of dynamics at work here… neat stuff.