Twitter tool tracks election tweets

With the UK's 'first Twitter election' expected to take place on 6 May, Tweetlection has been launched to track political comments on the popular micro-blogging service.

The tool "harvests and analyses" tweets that mention keywords relating to the three main parties - Labour, Conservative and Liberal Democrat - to find out what voters are really thinking and discussing.

The information gathered over the last seven days is presented in the form of graphs, which are updated in real time to reflect how Twitter users are reacting to news stories.

These show you how many tweets have contained particular party-related words, for example 'hague' and 'cameron' for the Tories, 'unite' and 'economy' for Labour and 'clegg' and 'porn' for the Liberals.

A pie chart on the homepage displays a breakdown of the total number of tweets over the last week, and there are options to filter the data by popular and significant tweeters.

"With Tweetlection, users can see at a glance the frequency of tweets over time for each party and the common themes in those tweets," said Aidan Cook, managing director of Sense Internet, which created the tool.

"This might help the political parties modify their existing themes and messages, or create new ones. It will give them a better understanding of the impact that particular policy proposals and Twitter discussions about them may be having on voters."

View our round-up of Twitter applications and tools.