Twitter's Political Engagement Map tracks how people respond to the candidates' tweets

Twitter has been particularly active this election cycle, offering tweet-based popularity charts of Romney and Obama and selling its first political trending topic. Now it's added the Political Engagement Map, another effort to harness Twitter's potential as a polling platform.

The map is conceptually simple: it takes each recent tweet from Romney and Obama and checks the number of favorites and retweets it's received, then checks location to plot it by US state. Clicking on a given tweet displays where engagement is strong, and entering a keyword brings up the most popular tweets that include it. In practice, seeing a map that's entirely red or blue is initially confusing, but being able to sort by individual tweets and states is a great idea.