govtweets.com and govtweets.ca
I’ve been working on a couple of new website that use twitter. For those of you who aren’t familiar with twitter, it’s a new web service that simply asks “what are you doing?”. Think of it as Facebook stripped down to the status update, with integrated direct messaging a channel communication. The status update has been with us for a while from the days of the ICQ away message, to MSN messenger name changes, to Facebook and now twitter. You can update your status from the web, from Firefox, via SMS or Blackberry. Twitter is great for finding out what your friends or those who you follow are up to as it aggregates status updates from those you set up on your account.
govtweets is a website that I created to follow conversations, not just from friends, but from the public “tweets” from individuals discussing the US Presidential race at govtweets.com and Canadian politics at govtweets.ca. The updates appear live and inline on the websites, so you don’t need to refresh to have the updates streaming in. Americans are hooked in to twitter and so govtweets.com has a constant stream of the conversations that are occurring regarding McCain, Obama, Biden and Palin, while Canadians have yet to embrace the service in a big way so updates trickle in on Harper, Dion and Layton (I may add May soon since she’s a real contender now /sarcasm).
I’d encourage you to check out both websites. For political web junkies, interesting URLs for interesting websites and articles are tweeted by users. I found Barackas.com and the news that Palin’s wikipedia paged was scrubbed just before news of her selection was made official all via govtweets.com
Let me know what you think and if you want to see more action on the govtweets.ca page, start tweeting about Canadian politics.
Oh, and follow me on Twitter!