Obama, McCain Debate Via Twitter: How To Follow Along*

Peter Kafka | June 20, 2008 12:34 PM

obama-mccain.jpgWant to know what Barack Obama thinks about net neutrality? John McCain's views on white space spectrum? Good luck learning about that during any of this fall's official debates. But we're reasonably sure these and other issues will come up via a semi-formal debate the two campaigns are starting up today -- via Twitter.

Here are the pretty loose ground rules for the event, organized by Andrew Rasiej's Personal Democracy Forum: Sometime today, moderator Ana Marie Cox will start lobbing questions to two officially sanctioned stand-ins for the rival campaigns -- Mike Nelson, who's advising the Obama campaign on tech issues, and Liz Mair, online communcations director for the Republican National Committee. The debate is supposed to focus exclusively on tech, so if you're looking for arguments about Iraq or campaign financing, you're going to be disappointed. But since it's completely in the hands of Ana Marie, best known as the original Wonkette, we're betting it's going to be quite lively.

How to play along: You can "follow" all three particpants via Twitter (we've linked to each one above). Or you can search for their Tweets on Summize, using the "#pdfdebate" tag as a search term. Third option: A "Tweetboard" which lays out all of the players, side-by-side.

The event kicks off some time this evening, and is supposed to run through the weekend, at least. It's tied to PDF 2008, Andrew's impressive two-day tech-meets-politics conference, which kicks off Monday. Bonus for SAI readers: $100 off the $695 ticket price. Register online and enter "SAI" as the promotion code.

*Update: Initial conclusion after the first evening's set of questions - great concept, poor execution. Love the notion of forcing the candidates - or their proxies, in this case - to confine their answers to brief responses. But it's nearly impossible to follow a discussion between three different Twitters - it's like flipping between three different TV channels.

You can get the most info and least headaches by watching here, but it's still a frustrating experience. We hope this can get fixed on the fly (how?) and if not, we hope someone tackles the problem for the next go-round.

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47 Comments

Nate Westheimer (URL) said:
geeky and cool!

in fact, it's quite rad!
TwitFreak said:
good idea. but hopefully they won't get the infamous twitter "whale fail" message during the debate.
Jumping Jack (URL) said:
How can McCain participate in a debate about technology when he doesn't know how to use a computer?
rabprevent said:
McCain is an elithist, he will have someone to turn the computer on, someone to read the question outloud and GW willbe standing to force feed him the answers
Rip Cord said:
Are you kidding me? If Obama and McCain aren't doing this -- and McCain has an RNC rep, not even a staffer???? What a waste.
Marah Marie (URL) said:
"Obama, McCain Debate Via Twitter: How To Follow Along"

Shameless exaggeration. I only clicked the link assuming "truth in advertising" principles were at work here; apparently they were not. Guys, please write headlines that reflect reality, not headlines that will garner SAI the most page views. The more you waste people's time the less they'll come back...not that you'll miss me - but you might begin to miss everyone else.
Edgar Kreps (URL) said:
You can also follow the behind-the-scenes action on this debate at http://www.sh-tter.com
Funny said:
Too bad Andrew Rasiej is an ass wipe.
Shawn (URL) said:
I think Obama may prevail over McCain. Besides, With Obama's energy, he makes it clear he's the perfect candidate for The U.S. presidency


Shawn Drewry
HoHum said:
If you like to watch molasses slowly drip.

Then this is for you.

No content, just fluff.
I'm less concerned about content; more concerned about how difficult it is to find the content. Frustrating.
FN (URL) said:
This is a terrible format for a debate. Instead of 10 second sound bites we get 140 character strings. Frankly a topic like this deserves long-form discussion and debate. I would love to see a town-hall meeting with McCain and Obama in Silicon Valley where the audience is leading technologists. That would be interesting.
Joshua Marker said:
Anyone who thinks this is a good idea for democracy deserves what they get, 'good and hard' as H L Mencken said. Unfortunately, the rest of us suffer along with them.

I have tin cans and string in my back yard. It goes down less often than twitter, and is almost as good at interfering with rhetoric and genuine communication of substantive ideas. I intend to impose a 15 word limit, and all questions will be the ones used to interview America's Next Top Model participants. I don't see why I can't host the next one; after all, since we can, we should.


GPo said:
This was a great demonstration of how usability and interface design gets in the way of a great idea.

Using Twitter to capture an asynchronous conversation is simply ineffective. The amount of manual bouncing around you need to do between the three accounts makes it impossible to follow the discussion.

With only 140 characters, you can't provide any context, so you have no idea where you are in the thread.

The tweet-speak of #'s and @'s just gets in the way of anybody trying to figure out what's going on. On summize.com you have the added issue of anybody else getting in on the debate.

And there's really no need for a moderator, because you don't easily see the answer to their question.

If anything, let the two functionals have at it but in a limited forum. Oh, but that would be an IM chat.
TweetBoards (URL) said:
Tweetboards has added a thread feature that will splice the tweets together in order to timestamp. See here:
http://tinyurl.com/5e4kej
will (URL) said:
this is not a real debate. Why doesn't Obama want to answer qusetion Like. The problem with Extreme poeple that have partys because Isreali is upset because there soilders were killed for terrorist groups. What is he going to do about fuel prices that isn't going to take 30 yrs to see a difference. how is he going to lower taxes so everyday people can survive. And What did he mean when he said his grandmother had "the typical white peoson response!
will said:
I guess if you disagree with Obama you can't post anything here. Not suprised by the censership, It only applies whin somebody has different thoughts than you!!!!
TLH in KY said:
When need a real and formal debate and soon.
Let's get to the issues - LIVE - this will tell the story.

I think one GREAT and WONDEROUS candidate will mumble through most of the difficult questions.

Let's see!
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