On Vote Report

I’m torn on the value of Twitter. For a long time I have thought it largely useless because I don’t know anyone who uses it and dismissed it as a phenomenon of the tech blogosphere echo chamber. However as with Flickr I have started to see the value of it now I can see it presented in a way I actually find useful.

My basic criticism of the service was that it will never cross to the mainstream as most people don’t want to continuously broadcast their status to the world. Now I still think that the number of people who update their statuses is relatively small but I realised I was missing a much larger class of users who never actually sign up for the service itself.

What changed my mind was Twitter Vote Report. This service gives a realtime update of useful information such as wait times on election day. Combined with Plodt this gives a stream of valuable realtime information that could not come from anywhere else. It does not matter that most people aren’t Twitter users – there are enough of them to continuously monitor what is happening and with the right tools that info can be turned into something valuable to non-Twitter users like me.

Now I can’t immediately think of the other applications this could have but for the first time I have seen a glimmer of why Twitter’s devotees are so enthralled with it.

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