Nov
03
2008

Twitter Exit Polls

In response, and as an addition, to Wilbert Baans’ storytelling with public databases, I made a little twitter scraper. It indexed all twits for the query http://search.twitter.com/search?q=%22i+voted%22+%2B+McCain+OR+Obama+-twitvote, up till a month ago. From November the 4th till November the 5th the script scrapes new twits for this query every minute.

A point goes to Obama if the regular expression /vote.*?obama/i succeeds, it goes to McCain if the regular expression /vote.*mccain/i succeeds, else it is undecided / unrecognized.

The result can be found at Twitter Poll. So far Obama is winning.

Update: Wilbert Baan has made theses stats into a beautiful visualization:

There is an other twitter poll on Mashable.

Update 2: I tried making a similar exit poll based on MySpace, but that query does not yield results sorted on time. Also, just like Google, MySpace only returns a maximum of 1000 results per query. Unfortunately I’m thus stuck with the same numbers, no matter how many times I will scrape it.

Written by Erik in: General | Tags: , , ,

13 Comments »

  • Nice, will keep track of it tomorrow night. Are you bringing your laptop BTW?

    Is the Twitter Poll omitting duplicates because I noticed multiple (but different) tweets from the same person?

    Comment | 4/11/2008
  • [...] great polling service Erik Borra created a polling service based on what people say on Twitter. With the service you get results on what people say they voted [...]

    Pingback | 4/11/2008
  • [...] great polling service Erik Borra created a polling service based on what people say on Twitter. With the service you get results on what people say they voted [...]

    Pingback | 4/11/2008
  • [...] can say Twitter is pretty much in favor of Obama. To update the results refresh the page. A point goes to Obama if the regular expression /vote.*?obama/i succeeds, it goes to McCain if the regular expression [...]

    Pingback | 4/11/2008
  • [...] I made the first the first animation Erik Borra replied by developing the idea into something that stores the data retrieved from Twitter in a database. I made a new interface [...]

    Pingback | 4/11/2008
  • [...] Twitter Poll von Erik Borra handelt es sich um eine einfache, aggregierte Auswertung einer Twitter Suche, bei der man sich [...]

    Pingback | 4/11/2008
  • [...] Un’altra rappresentazione visiva del voto in corso si trova su TwitterPoll (il grafico relativo รจ qui). [...]

    Pingback | 4/11/2008
  • [...] couple of innovative ways of using Twitter are the I voted widget and the Twitter Exit Polls, showing how Twitterers voted. And Mashable has combines tweets and mapping to show the election [...]

    Pingback | 4/11/2008
  • Twitter is great for everything it is a revolutionary THING for Internet.

    Comment | 7/11/2008
  • As we know now, he is President of US now. I am impressed with Twittwer though. I have read some very good stories about twitter and how people are using it. Even a lady has got a good job from there. I think this is the peak of Social Media stuff.

    Comment | 18/11/2008
  • looks like, that the twitter user were totally right ;)

    Comment | 25/11/2008
  • i like this blog it is great. As we know now he is President of united states now. I am inspired with Twitter though. I have read some interesting good stories about twitter and how people are using it. Even a lady has got a good job from there. I like it very much.

    Comment | 16/12/2008
  • It seems that your scraper was an accurate measure of how the election played out. Nice job using the net for an accurate picture on what was to come.

    Comment | 1/1/2009

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