Twitter: More than an Annoying Teen Toy

For Twitter:

IowaCaucus
 IowaCaucus's updates via SMS.
Tonight's after-action: http://tinyurl.com/2e3pwh. This is @IowaCaucus signing off! about 11 hours ago It
looks like Edwards was really the second choice of many, but O
overpowered with first-choice voters. about 13 hours ago from web pre-viability
based on entry poll: Obama 35, Clinton 26.5, Edwards 23.5, Richardson
7, Biden 4.5, Dodd 1.5, Kucinich 1.5, Gravel 0 about 13 hours ago from

Source: twitter.com via biverson

They were twittering from inside the caucus locations last night. Patrick Ruffini set up this twitter experiment (see below) and John Dickerson was twittering as he reported for Slate, and I think the live tweets that are fleshed out in his Slate writing work really well. Shout out to John -- watch that cough....
Gregory Hauenstein twittered as the "new media intern with Obama for America, stationed in Des Moines, IA.   BlogsofWar reported on the caucus via twitter with a bit of partisan snarkiness. Mark Glaser's mediashift covered the twitter blanket over Iowa as well as blogs and video that could be found online.

At 11:33 a.m on January 4th, Google showed 1,210 posts with "twitter iowa caucus" within the past 24 hours. I almost left out podcasts, but Podcasting News linked to podcasts, videocast sites and twitter. Techpresident.com  blogged about twitter before and after the caucus, mainly noting that you didn't need cnn anymore to follow the news.

 Professor Elaine Champlain mixed twitter with a look at other social networking sites, including screen grabs of candidate sites the night of the caucus with commentary, asked the important question,

Did the Twittering and Facebooking and MySpacing and Action Centers and blogging make a difference and get more people out to caucus or help spread the word in any way?

Source: champlainprofessor.blogspot.com via biverson

I think the answer is going to grow from an "I think so" to "of course" in 2008 as mobile connections, texting, and open source mobile connection tools make it into the palms of Americans. Will it turn non-voters into voters? Looking at Korean experience with "thumbvoters" (mobile users who text from their phones, including voting from there) I'd say, just like my old eight-ball,  "it is likely"

NowPublic

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