We?ve seen it dozens of times before. The famous scene of a political candidate in a large room, balloons floating and banners strewn about, surrounded by supporters and family, anxiously watching the television as the election results come in.
This year?s election might look a little different. The TV may be blaring results, but the presidential candidates? staffs may also be following the Twitter Political Index, a new feature that monitors political sentiment on Twitter.
Adam Sharp, head of government, news and social innovation at Twitter, said in a phone?interview?that the new Twitter Index, or Twindex, monitors hundreds of millions of Twitter messages searching for opinions and views about both 2012 presidential candidates.
The messages are then sorted by what people are saying about President Obama or?Mitt Romney, the presumptive Republican nominee, and then creates a poll of those views.
The new site, housed at election.twitter.com, will be updated each day at 8 p.m., Eastern time, to reflect the latest daily views about the candidates.
The Twindex is not meant to replace traditional polls, Mr. Sharp said, but rather to offer an?additional, real-time view of the nation?s feelings about candidates as they appear in the news and as voters try to decide which candidate they want to run the country for the next four years.
?We believe the Twitter political index reinforces the transitional models of research,? explained?Mr. Sharp. ?By providing more signals, more dials ? that can agree or disagree ? these new technologies give a more complete picture of crafting a political forecast.?
On a company blog post, Twitter said the Twindex was built in partnership with a data analysis team from?Topsy, an online search and analytics company,?and two polling firms,?the Mellman Group?and?North Star Opinion Research.
Topsy sifts through Twitter messages and uses advanced semantic analysis software to determine if someone is in support of a candidate, or a detractor.
Mr. Sharp said the index had a database of thousand of words to understand if these Twitter messages were for or against a candidate. As these messages are being shared by millions of people on Twitter, the software also?takes into account?colloquialisms.
Mr. Sharp noted that ?bad,? for instance, could mean bad, or it be slang for good. He said that Topsy could differentiate between these words in a sentence and if they are positive or negative.
This is not the first time Twitter has worked on a?presidential?election Web site.
In 2008, during the last election, the company built a site that corralled all the Twitter messages about the candidates. But things have definitely changed in the last four years. In the last election, Twitter users sent 1.8 million messages on the day of the election. Today, with people sending 400 million messages on a typical day, that represents a little over six minutes of Twitter volume.
Source: http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/08/01/twitter-unveils-the-twindex-a-new-political-index/
virginia beach crash kellie pickler stephen hawking marion barry virginia beach jet crash ridiculously photogenic guy amanda bynes dui
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.