With the election rapidly approaching, it’s getting hard to keep track of all of the political news swirling around the web. Perspctv, a new mashup from developer Vineet Choudhary, utilizes 14 web services to try to bring all of the news together in one place.
To monitor current political news, the site searches for the terms “Obama” and “McCain” in Twitter conversations, news articles, and blog posts, and displays updates in real time. Results are presented in attractive graphs, and each candidates’ popularity can be viewed as a function of time.
The site’s most glaring flaw is that it determines popularity by measuring the number of times each candidate’s name is mentioned, without taking the word’s context into account. Obviously, many of these mentions are negative – Obama’s lead across every metric probably isn’t an accurate measure of his popularity. People may just like to talk about him more often.
Choudhary says that he is looking into integrating some kind of natural language algorithm to help separate positive comments from the negative ones, but for the time being we’ll have to settle for this unrefined analysis. And while there may be no significant correlation between Twitter mentions and a candidate’s chance of winning the election, Perspctv is still a good looking site that’s fun to play around with.
With all due respect to Vineet for his hard work, Perspctv is simply the worst “web 2.0″ name of all the terrible “web 2.0″ names.
Good effort on the product.
Best,
Curtis
Your cucking crazy! CuckU is much worse than Perspctv.
Pointless Plug: http://www.imageco.com
Wow, a mashup is worth a whole post nowadays on TC, what the hell.
who would won???
I have to question my own judgment for choosing to comment on such an irrelevant post. What am I thinking!
these polls should not be trusted. Yesterday, Gallup called me. when I mentioned that I was a Democrat voting for Barack OBama, they told me that they already had enough Obama supporters in my demographic and hung up.
I’m not the only one, either: http://www.newsbreaktimes.com
But even as “Politics 2.0″ have become a bigger part of the overall process, the percentage is relatively low.
According to this series of polls, only 22 percent of Americans admit to reading political blogs on a regular basis, while 56 percent admitted to never reading a blog about politics.
Ouch…
i’m the guy behind perspctv:
1. sure, nothing conclusive comes from perspctv — but it gives insight to the chatter and expressions about the candidates — not to mention the “live feeds” as a good way to monitor all the talk…
2. it’s meant to be a “dashboard” for election junkies — contrasting the “live” data with polling data…
3. press — good or bad — it’s great to have a dialogue going
4. relevance for techcrunch — techcrunch covers innovation on the web — mashups are “innovation” — I don’t see why this post is criticized as “not tc material”… perspctv uniquely integrates 14 APIs and services together.
Vineet -
Don’t say “ouch”! You created something that is useful for political junkies, and your design, UX and coding skills are impressive. Beautiful work.
(I don’t know Vineet from Adam, I just think he deserves a little adulation)
I don’t see where the site mentions that the popularity charts are meant as an indication of *positive* popularity.
Why must we assume it only measures positive comments? Context? Who cares.
@vineet,
how did you track the twitter mentions? with thier streaming disabled to 3rd party?
cool app .
This is a cool site. I especially like the electoral map from electoral-vote.com and the tracking of twitter mentions.
Another great election site just launched too — very different but equally as fun: votegopher.com. Covers the candidates’ positions on 25 issues (with videos) and has a great My Ballot candidate matching tool to match your positions to the candidates…and the fun gopher designs to back it up. Also has good election coverage aggregation and very web 2.0.
Hey TC why is your site trying to get me to download “atlas_rm.htm”?
nice site, for those who are politically involved.. http://blabtech.blogspot.com
that’s actually a very cool mashup. thanks for sharing…
well!! Vineet… let all say whatever they want to… i feel this is a great start… and as you gather some feedback… the product will become all the more better… good luck!! and yes i would definitely like to know how you did the twitter thing…
@vineet
Really awesome mash-up! This is way better than most major news sites pull together. I love the transitions.
I agree that Twitter mentions are not necessarily a lead indicator of voting intention but they are another data point to use in trend analysis. (It is funny that even Arizona Twitterers are tweeting more about Obama!)
An election poll aggregation site that has daily, serious, thoughtful and informed analysis, both of polls and the daily political landscape: http://www.electoral-vote.com
disclaimer – i know The Votemaster. But the site is great.
thanks for all the supportive comments! very encouraging. re: how do i get the twitter data — i use the Summize API — which is now called “Twitter Search” after Twitter acquired them… They don’t put the same call restrictions on their API that Twitter does.
Not everything is to have good ideas but know execute
Better to have people talking about you, good and bad, then not talking. I am certain their a correlation between mentions and chance of winning
Comedy Central has had this for over a year. Also embeddable and they cover more candidates.
http://blog.ind...-stock-tracker/
Great… another independent political website that mindlessly echoes the corporate propaganda… We really need more of this garbage packaged in nice little graphs…
How about moving away from the oversimplified horse race farce those elections have been turned into by corporate greed and corrupt politicians?
How about including ALL the candidates?
“But FOX told me they don’t have a chance” you say?
That would be my point…
With or without those algorithms, it was obvious that Obama was going to win weeks before the election.