(Credit:
CNET Networks)
If you're trying to keep up with U.S. politics today, be prepared for an onslaught. There's an all-day mudslide of information, and no end of sources to get it from. Google's decided to join the fray and, with the help of microblogging service Twitter, has created a live, moving mapplet to track people's tweets that are related to politics. All the tweets are geotagged with the Twitter user's city and state, so you can see where they posted from, right down to the county.
While a good deal of the tweets are useless (see example above), there are a few that link to blog posts, or important notes about long wait times at the polls. However, my bet is that most people will stick to their regular news sites for the most up-to-date information. Speaking of which, if you're in the mood for more tangible poll results, you can check out Google's primary results gadget, which displays percentages for each candidate, by state on a simple chart. It's available as a standalone embed (which I've added after the break) and as a gadget for your iGoogle homepage.
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MySpace is set to launch a voting platform for the presidential primaries early next year, allowing MySpace users to submit a mock vote for their favorite candidate. While the results won't actually count as real votes for election into office, candidates will no doubt try to win the coveted title of MySpace's people's choice winner. There's already a list up on MySpace's Impact page, where 11 of the candidates have thumbnail links to their MySpace profiles.
MySpace has more than 100 million registered users, with around 230,000 new ones each day. The prospect of testing an online voting system with this magnitude of potential users is exciting, although plagued with issues given the amount of spam and gaming that goes on inside its walls. As TechCrunch notes, rival social network Facebook would likely be the better choice for this experiment, as it actually requires e-mail or mobile verification for account creation. Not to mention they've already done something similar. There's nothing to say they won't try this as well.
Also something to keep an eye on as we get closer to next January: how MySpace integrates their upcoming social news platform with candidate updates.
[via News.com]
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