California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger is heading to Twitter’s headquarters in San Francisco today to do a live streaming webchat with co-founders Evan Williams and Biz Stone. Oddly, Twitter hasn’t posted about it on its blog, but much of the company is atwitter (see what I did there) over the arrival. And so is the Governor, who tweets, “If you want to send in questions for my webchat at twitter hq with @ev and @biz, now is the time. You snooze, you lose.”
So what’s the purpose behind the Governor’s visit and the webcast? Well, Schwarzenegger has just launched a new Twitter-based site for California, MyIdea4CA.com. Yes, he’s using the social network to crowd-source ideas for how to run the state. Here’s the way the site describes how the process works:
Ideas are submitted to the website through your Twitter account when you include the hashtag #myidea4ca along with your idea in your tweet. MyIdea4CA.com centralizes the Twitter conversation by indexing the #myidea4ca tweets so they can be searched, sorted, and ranked and extends the conversation by allowing users to vote and add comments.
So basically, it’s Digg meets Twitter — to help run the state of California.
But has the idea already gone to pot? Right now, the top three vote-getters by far on MyIdea4CA are all about legalizing marijuana in some way. All of the other most popular suggestions are about overhauling the education system. I’m not sure which seems less likely to happen.
I’m also not sure where the Governor’s live stream will be held, so I’ll update when I find out [Update below]. He should be at Twitter HQ any minute now judging from the tweets.
Update: It’s worth noting that when then President-Elect Obama, launched a similar “Idea Generator” with Salesforce.com, the top vote-getter was also to legalize pot.
Update 2: Schwarzenegger has tweeted out that the conversation is now going on live right here.
[image: Tri-Star Pictures]