Ah, the olden days. Remember the night of the New Hampshire primaries? Like many people inside the beltway, I was at a happy hour, wishing that someone would turn on CNN and rather clumsily using my cell phone to surf for poll results. That very same night, I heard about a cure for people like me, addicted to CNN the night of every primary. Little did I now that someone, somewhere could actually do the watching and the reporting for me.

That night marked the debut of Politweets, a site that tracks Twitter conversations about the presidential candidates. Josh Catone credits Politweets for informing him that Senator Clinton won New Hampshire. Politweets told me the moment Fred Thompson dropped out of the race on January 22.

Jason Garber and Doug March, two of the minds behind Politweets, recently had a conversation with IPDI about the project. Neither Garber nor March characterizes himself as a politico. Neither expressed an interest in politics until recently: “Politics was the thing that caused arguments at the bar,” said March. They’re web developers for Revolution Health and Mixx.com, respectively (both also created Twittertale, a site that tracks curse words in the twitterverse), and are highly involved in the Refresh DC Meetup.

In a testament to the power of social networks, Garber and March say that a presentation at a recent Refresh DC event by the Sunlight Foundation (plus an email from Twittertale fan Dan Croak, who then assisted in the development of Politweets) encouraged them to look more closely at transparency in politics. Less than two hours after Garber, March, and a team of other developers (including Gabe Hanford, Alisa Schadt, and Min Kim) came up with the idea, Politweets was born as a citizen-powered tool to share information about the primaries. It took a few more days for the site to be ready for prime time.

Politweets, then, is built with the imperative that “anything citizens can do to open the political process to transparency is a good thing.” In this context, said Garber and March, when regular people take the time to share information with each other online, we become public figures in our own right. We power a different avenue of information, one that enhances the stories and storylines created by the mainstream media.

As March put it, “Twitter is like a river of information. We took a stream off that river and separated comment about the presidential candidates from the noise.”

Expect the site to evolve before Super Tuesday to include links to pages that display the latest five tweets on each candidate and aggregate information posted by the campaigns on other social networking communities.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 22nd, 2008 at 10:24 pm and is filed under 2008 Election, Twitter. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.