Life, the Universe and Everything

poptech:

Twitter Launches Political Index: The Twitter Pulse Of The Election

Right now, if you want to know how the country feels about Barack Obama or Mitt Romney, you have to rely on pundits’ intuitions or traditional opinion polls, conducted as they always have been — by phone, over the course of hours or days. There’s no direct way to check the pulse of millions of actual people, simultaneously and directly, second by second.

Twitter is launching a tool today that it says will fill that gap, and sort through the 400 million tweets a day from 140 million active users. Twitter and real-time search engine Topsy are launching the “Twitter Political Index,” a daily assessment of how Twitter feels about Obama and Romney, in an election cycle that’s being played out moment-to-moment on the social service.

(via sunfoundation)

Funny… Let’s see if this proves to be “true” in the end. I can see how this can be pretty acurate, and if it is it’s a very useful new tool, for politics in general probably.