The Pulse of a Nation, all a-Twitter

Ah, election day. Future Boy is a confirmed political junkie, and it’s especially heartening to see a polling day where his adopted homeland of California actually matters. Accordingly, FB will be spending the night in the customary manner: at his computer, with a live stream of NPR coverage in one corner of the screen and a chat room with similar politics-mad journo pals in the other.

But now there’s one more window to keep a constant eye on: the Google-Twitter Super Tuesday mashup.  For those poor saps still unfamiliar with Twitter, it’s one of the coolest little apps to come out of a small business last year (the small business being Obvious Corp., brainchild of Ev Williams, the co-founder of Blogger). You and anyone you’re following on the service post pithy little updates on what you’re currently doing, or thinking, or anything else that takes up less than 140 characters. You can do this online or on your phone. The result: a kind of ticker-tape of community consciousness. After resisting Twitter’s lure for some time, FB gave in recently, and discovered it to be less inane and narcissistic than he’d feared. (If you’re interested, his user name is — what else? — FutureBoy.)

Twitter gave rise to Twittervision, where you can see random Twitter posts arrive in real time on a Google Map of the world, depending on where the Twitter-er comes from. That was fun, but little more than a curiosity. The Google-Twitter Super Tuesday collaboration focuses the random posts and overlays them on a map of the U.S. with all its electoral districts on display. The upshot is the most heartwarming sense of democracy in action that FB has ever seen. A user pops up in Georgia, bemoaning the fact that his mother-in-law and wife both voted for Hillary as “the least of all evils.” Five seconds later, someone in Kansas laughs at the people he’s seen still voting for Edwards. “Hello? McFly?” Obama wins Georgia, and Twitters pop up around the country, celebrating and cursing.

All we need now is for these people to actually talk to each other, rather than a website that gives us the illusion. But what an illusion — and what a great ad for Twitter.