Twitter hopes to reflect nuances of public opinion with political barometer

Twitter introduced what it is calling a political barometer to measure user feelings toward the two presidential candidates based on user Tweets, taking advantage of the huge amount of data coming through Twitter to add context to the political landscape. Twitter has partnered with data analysis folks from Twitter-search company Topsy and data polling firms to examine how user sentiment toward a candidate compares to all Tweets about that candidate across the site. Here’s how the scoring works, according to Twitter: “A score of 73 for a candidate indicates that Tweets containing their name or account name are on average more positive than 73 percent of all Tweets,” the company said in its blog post.