@Twitter Political Index

The next 100 days count – and Twitter is counting our sentiments and online interactions to gauge the potential outcome of the presidential campaign in the U.S.: Today, Twitter launched a new site called the Twitter Political Index. According to the Twitter blog, the @gov team is analyzing the +2 million tweets every week to understand how the nation’s Twitter users feel about President Obama and his challenger Romney.

The index represents:

a daily measurement of Twitter users’ feelings towards the candidates as expressed in nearly two million Tweets each week.

Twitter teams up with USAToday’s election team and Topsy to display the sentiment results in the newspaper’s Election Meter. The sentiments are measured on a 0 to 100 scale and everything above 50 is coded as positive sentiment. A sliding scale lets users go back in time and shows sentiments including their related historical events (such as important visits, or speeches):