Following the Elections: The Twitter Way

2009 May 17

by jithinkr

The Indian Lok Sabha Elections just got over, ya and also the counting. The results have been out and Congress is a sure winner. Just short of 10 seats to form the Government.

This year’s election left everyone shocked and flabbergasted. Congress didn’t expect such a victory. BJP didn’t expect such a loss. And the Marxsist didn’t think that they will lose in Kerala and West Bengal.

My mother is a election fanatic. She loves to argue and debate about anything related to politics (especially kerala politics). When most newspapers and channels predicted that it will be AIADMK which will be winning in Tamil Nadu, she begged to differ and she was correct!

So she followed the election thanks to the television. She is more interested in the Kerala election results and was glued to Asianet News Channel since morning. I too was pulled into the election results and I too found myself listening to my mama about what the election results will be this time.

I thought I will follow the elections in my way, the Internet way! And for that the best source is twitter. Of course some of the people I follow had already started tweeting the live counting results. I came to know that the official website of the election commission was a FAIL. Too bad, someone please help them. Well the counting went on as expected without any glitch. And the news channels were following the results closely.

So coming back to twitter. But twitter alone wasn’t a good way to see what’s going on. I searched for india, india votes and india election. I also searched for Congress, BJP and kerala. Of course I did the searches in twitter. For real time information blogs aren’t the way. Micro blogs like twitter is the answer for that.

But I wanted to see the search results being updated in real time and also all the results on a single page. Following the twitter revolution, I knew that there were so many websites and applications adding functionality to tweets and my intuition told me that there should be a website which would give me just what I wanted.

TWEET GRID

Check out tweetgrid by jazzychad. It creates a twitter search dashboard that updates in real time. I created a 3 x 3 dashboard and entered the search queries indiavotes09, india election, Congress, BJP, Kerala, NDTV. And the tweets started rolling in. Now it was me telling mama about the latest news in different constituencies. (It was pretty fun to follow the elections results in Ernakulum. That’s a story for another post!)