140: The 2008 election's other magic number

Elizabeth Chuck Reporter • Profile • E-mail

While 270 electoral votes is the target number to capture on election night, 140 has been key to capturing voters’ attention throughout this campaign season — 140 characters, that is.

Despite the seemingly infinite amount of space on the Internet, posting in paragraphs has become passé. Enter microblogging site Twitter.com, a social network that has broken political news, served as a barometer of real-time reaction to the candidates, and even caused scandal for the camps throughout the 2008 election season, all within the confines of dispatches (called “tweets”) no longer than 140 characters long. Anyone from the techiest of nerds to your slightly computer-phobic mom can post tweets for everyone to see.

“People are looking for more ways to communicate with each other in public,” Biz Stone, co-founder of Twitter, told msnbc.com.

For Jon Deal from Salt Lake City, Utah, debate nights meant dividing his attention between two sources: his TV to watch the debate, and his Twitter homepage for the response from the public.

“There's a lot of real-time reaction,” Deal, 41, a graphic design production artist, said. “It's a blast, actually, because people say some very amusing and very insightful commentary.”

A Barack Obama supporter in a state that's leaning red, Deal said the political leanings of the people he reads – or “follows”- on Twitter are similar to his own.

James Thornburg, a twitterer in the battleground state of Ohio who said “Even members of my family are going different ways” on Election Day, often uses Twitter as a supplement to traditional news outlets.

“I’ve noticed the moment something is said during a debate, somebody can go out and point out a falsehood and back it up with tweet, after tweet, after tweet,” he said.

Use Twitter like a pro on Election Day Register for an account at Twitter.com. Choose a username you like; part of the fun of Twitter is people publicly responding to your tweets and vice-versa. If your username is TwitterNewbie, other twitterers will reply to you by starting their tweets with "@TwitterNewbie." Cast your vote for the president in Twitter's mock election, twitvote.twitmarks.com. Check out and participate in election.twitter.com, a constantly updated stream of what people are saying about politics on Twitter. Hot topics are highlighted at the top of the page. If you have voting problems, head over to twittervotereport.com, a site that compiles tweets of people sharing their voting experiences and suggesting resources.

While Twitter declines to release the number of registered users it has, research firms report Twitter.com had more than one million unique U.S. visitors in August. Stone said the user base has grown about 600 percent over the past year.

“We’re evolving the way we communicate as a species,” he said.

The way we consume our news – particularly political news – is evolving as well. And the implications could be big for the future of politics.

Stone points out that Twitter users aren't just voters; more than 40 members of Congress that he is aware of have profiles as well. “Having all these politicians and congressmen on Twitter means you can say to your constituents, ‘What do you think I should be doing right now?’ They can get instant feedback.”

Rep. John Culberson of Houston, for example, sends regular updates to his more than 3,600 followers through Twitter. “I will keep you posted on developments tomorrow in the House on the Paulson bailout bill,” he told them on Oct. 2, and lived up to his promise the next day in a series of tweets from the Capitol.

Democracy 'operating at the pace of real-time'
This, Stone says, means “Democracy is now operating at the pace of real-time. It's going to be important to have tools that allow you to make the right decisions, right now, rather than get left behind waiting.”

Brian Reich, author of “Media Rules: Mastering Today's Technology to Connect With and Keep Your Audience,” said tools like Twitter catch on because of their simplicity.

Why 140? On Twitter.com, users answer the question "What are you doing?" in 140 characters or less. But why so short? Biz Stone, co-founder of Twitter, explains it has to do with users sending and receiving status updates — or tweets — from so many different sources. "Text messages have a standard limit of 160 characters," he said. That means that someone can read a complete Twitter status update from a friend on a cell phone, and there's enough room within the text message space to include the username of the person who wrote the tweet. "By standardizing the messages in one short format, they can be read across many different devices," Stone said. "The whole idea is it's device-agnostic."

Social networks like Twitter, Facebook, MySpace.com and others provide a “built-in community. There's a rapid response, fact-check mechanism,” he said.

Reich says the site attracts the “political and technological elite” — bloggers or other Internet personalities who already had followings online were among the first to flock to Twitter when the site started in March 2006 — so the reach of a relative few is large.

Among those are political blog founder and Time Magazine campaign embed Ana Marie Cox, web strategist and Republican grassroots activist David All, CNN anchor Rick Sanchez, and MSNBC's Rachel Maddow. (Msnbc.com is a joint venture of Microsoft and NBC Universal.)

Both presidential candidates are on Twitter. At press time, twitter.com/barackobama had more than 112,000 followers; twitter.com/johnmccain had more than 4,600. (This discrepancy in their online fan bases is apparent across other social networks as well.)

The tweets from the "candidates" are typically press-release types of announcements and frequently, political spoofs on Twitter have attracted more attention than the candidates’ official profiles do.

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