TwittElection

I was convinced that the general election in 2010 was going to be the “Twitter election”. I built a web site (now sadly lost somewhere in cyberspace) that monitored what PPCs were saying on Twitter in my local constituency. But, all in all, it wasn’t very impressive. I gave a talk about how disappointing it had all been but then I forgot about it all.

But there’s another general election coming. And, surely, this one must be the Twitter election? A lot has changed in the last five years. Everyone is using Twitter. Surely this time some useful and interesting political discussion will take place on Twitter.

I set the bar a lot higher this time. Instead of just monitoring my local constituency, I’ve created a site that monitors all 650 constituencies in the country. Each constituency has a page, and on that page you’ll find a Twitter widget which displays a list I’m curating which contains all of the PPCs I can find for that constituency.

Well, when I say “I can find”, that’s a bit of a simplification. Obviously, finding details of all of the PPCs for 650 constituencies would be a bit of a mammoth task. But I’ve had help. There is a wonderful site called YourNextMP which is crowdsourcing details of all of the PPCs. And they have an API which allows me to grab their data periodically and update my information. If you have any information about PPCs in a constituency that they don’t already have, please consider adding it to their database.

After I found YourNextMP, it was just a simple matter of programming. I made heavy use of the Twitter API (via the Net::Twitter Perl module) and I’ve hosted the site on Github Pages (so I don’t need to worry if it suddenly gets massively popular). All of my code is available on Github – so feel free to send pull requests if there are features you’d like to add.

Oh, and obviously there’s a Twitter account – @TwittElection. Follow that if you want updates about the site or general chatter about the election campaign.

Today marks 100 days until the general election. I thought that was an appropriate day on which to officially launch the site.

Please let me know if you find the site useful.