How do I use poliTwitter?

Colour coded tweets

Tweets are colour coded to match the partisan affiliation of the poster. A tweet can also be coloured if the tweet includes a partisan hashtag. When viewing a partisan category, only MP's tweets are coloured, otherwise they would all by the same colour. MP's tweets are coloured in this case to make them stand out more.

MP indicator

Tweets by a member of Parliament have a red "MP" symbol on their avatar. Any Tweeter with a small grey box with a number inside is being tracked by the site but is not an MP.

Inline Tweeted Photos

When someone posts a photo with a tweet using Twitpic or Tweetphoto a thumbnail is show. Clicking the thumbnail will link to the full-sized photo.

Interact with Tweets

When you hover your mouse over any tweet, buttons are revealed on the right-side of the tweet. The top icon will reply to that tweeter, the middle icon will retweet and the bottom will add that tweet to your favorites.

Translate

Below each tweet is a translate link, this will toggle the tweet between english & french or visa versa.

Show Conversations

Also below some tweets is a "show conversation" link where a possible conversation is detected. Click this link to reveal the conversation.

Conversations

A conversation box is loaded inline showing the tweets back and forth. The yellow highlighted tweet is the source tweet you clicked to view the conversation.

View MP's Tweets Only

On most pages the stream includes tweets from MP's and the community, on the top bar is a "MP Only" button that will show only MP's tweets for that page you are currently viewing. For example if I am viewing the NDP category, I can click the 'MP only' button to view NDP MP tweets only.

Internal user experience

Unlike othet twitter mashups, almost all of the links on politwitter stay internal making for a more streamlined user experience. We automatically detect hashtags and @users and turn them into links. These links are internal pages, so you never leave politwitter.

Real-Time Tweet Updates

On most pages there is a "auto-update" button in the top-right. This will enable the tweet stream on that page to auto-update when any new tweets are made. New tweets will appear every 10 seconds, so if there is a flood of new tweets you have time to view them.

You can pause and restart the realtime update of tweets by toggling the button.

View "more" tweets (archive)

At the bottom of the tweet stream is often a "more.." button, this will load the next page of tweets. Politwitter archives all political tweets so you can go back through tweets farther than 'Twitter.com search' allows.

Search

At the top of the page is a search box, use this so search all of twitter. Beside the search box is a dropdown where you can choose to only search tweets that are indexed by politwitter.

Filters

Politwitter tracks a lot of different tweet data, the filter menu lets you use this data to filter tweets in almost endless ways. Click the "filter" button in the top-right of most tweet streams to reveal the filter menu. Select what criteria you want the tweets to be filtered by, then press apply.

Provincial Parties

When viewing a provincial tweets by province you will see a list of the political parties in that province. Clicking any of these will filter the list to show only tweets from that party.

List of Political Twitters

Politwitter maintains a detailed list of both Federal and provincial political tweeters. The main focus of the list is MP's and MLA's but other notable politweeters are included. The list can be filtered and sorted in MANY ways.

MP's with Facebook

On the lsit pages above and user pages a Facebook icon is shown when that MP has a facebook page. There will also be an indicator if the MP has a Youtube page.

Popularity

Popularity is tracked by politwitter & determined by how many mentions of that username or name in the last several months.

Hashtag List

Politwitter also maintains a list of federal and provincial hashtags used on Twitter. Popularity and last-used time are tracked for each hashtag. Anyone using any of these hashtags will be included in the politwitter streams.

Provincial Hashtags

Politwitter is trying to encourage anyone tweeting about provincial politics to use their provinces hashtag. So there tweet will be included in the provincial mode streams.

Find your MP

Along the right side and other various locations is search box you can use to find your local MP, to see if they are on Twitter. You can search using your MP's name or the name of your riding.

When there are multiple matches to your search we will present all the possible matches and let you choose the correct one.

MP's Without Twitter

The MP's without Twitter page has a list of all the federal MP's not on Twitter. You can click an MP's name to view there details and send them a message. Or you can use the checkboxes to select multiple MP's and send a bulk-email to all of the selected.

Encourage MP's to Twitter

When viewing an MP's profile who is not on Twitter there is a form to send an email encouraging that MP to start tweeting. You can change the message if you want. Your email address is NOT saved when you submit the form.

After you send an email to the MP you can retweet the petition, which will sign your Twitter name to the signatures list below.

Mobile Version

Politwitter has a mobile friendly version that works great on Windows Phones and iPhones. The mobile version is lean and fast saving your bandwidth.

Just visit http://politwitter.ca/ on your phone and it will automatically detect your on a mobile device and load the mobile version. There is a link at the very bottom of the site to manualy switch between the desktop and mobile versions.

Cross Browser Support

Politwitter is a fully XHTML compliant site and has been tested on all major browsers. Even older browsers like IE6 work fine.

Site Optimized

Page loading speed is a top priority for politwitter. All pages with a tweet stream are loaded first then the tweets are loaded after using ajax. so your pageloading is never slowed down. Almost all tweet streams are also cached locally, so they will load fast, even if Twitter.com is down (which happens a lot!).

The design of the site is a lightweight tableless markup for fast rendering. The filesize of the pages is optimized along with many other factors to make the site load as fast as possible.

Widget

Politwitter has a widget you can add to your website or blog that shows a mini tweet stream. The widget is available in many formats, including iGoogle, Netfirms, Vista gadnet and Wordpress.

Customizable Widget

The widget is highly customizable to suit your needs. You can change what tweets are included based on many criteria or even change the size of the widget.

Login

politwitter is a fully functional Twiter client. You can login with your twitter account to perform many interactions with the site. You can post tweets, photos, retweet, follow users and more! Your login info is not stored permanently and is safe & secure. politwitter WILL NEVER tweet without your own consenting action.

Save views

This is one of the most usefull features of the site. You can add almost any stream of tweets to your list of "saved views". In the top right of most tweet pages there is a button, clicking this will add this view to your saved list.

You can save hashtags, partisan categories, users, searches, filters and more.

What makes the saved views so handy is they will update automatically when there is a new tweet in any of the views you have saved. You can see there is a new tweet when a blue circle appears with a number representing how many new tweets there are. You don't even need to refresh the page for the counters to update, they will do so automatically in the background!

Online users

On most pages you can view how many people are currently using politwitter and now many are viewing the same page you are.

User Panel

When you are logged in you get some user links in the top-right. Clicking your mini-avatar image will goto your homepage where you can view all your friends tweets and post new tweets yourself. Clicking the @username link will show any tweets directed at you. The star icon will show your favorites and the 'account' link will link to your account settings on twitter.com.

Posting Tweets

You can post new tweets right from politwitter, click the red "POST" button in the top-right to reveal the post box.

You can type out your tweet will full URLs then click the "shorturls" button to have them automatically shortened!

Post Twit Pics

Click the "twitpic" button to select a picture that will be uploaded to twitpic and included in your tweet.

Auto-Tagging

Depending on what page you are currently viewing when you click the "post" button, the postbox will be pre-populated with the @user or hashtag of the page you are viewing.

Statistics & Trends

politwitter tracks many stats and trends and this data is available on the statisitcs page. Stats can be viewed by month.

Hashtag stats

Stats are also tracked for any political hashtags, when viewing a hashtag page you can see a graph showing how many times that hash was used by month.

Trending Topics

On the politwitter homepage you can see the top Canadian political trending topics. (still under devlopment)

Popular Hashtags

On most pages on the right side is a hashtag block showing the most popular hashtags in the last while. The list is sorted by popularity.

When in provincial politics mode the hashtag list changes to show provincial hashtags.

Trending Topics

When viewing party categories, the party logo and some links for more info are shown.

Recent Photo Stream

When viewing many pages there is a block on the right-side showing the most recent tweeted photos for that stream.

Tweeted Pics

The tweeted pics page is a gallery of all pictures tweeted. The gallery can be viewed by federal, provincial or MP's only.

MP Youtube Videos

The videos page shows all the recent Youtube videos from Canadian MP's.

Popular Links

Politwitter tracks any links included in tweets then find which links have been tweeted the most. The popular links page shows the top links of the day and of the last 2 weeks. The list can be filtered to only show links posted by MP's.

Retweet MP's Twitter

When viewing an MP's user page there is a green "retweet" button. This allows you to quickly let your followers know that this MP is on Twitter.

Follow

When viewing any user page you will see follow/unfollow links, you can follow users right from politwitter (this syncs with Twitter.com).

User Details

When viewing a user page of a person that is tracked by politwiter like MP's you will see some additional details. Some links to external sites with more info on that person and a graph showing how many followers they have each month.

MP's Quotes

When viewing an MP's page on the right-side is a block showing the most recent quotes by that MP in the house of commons.

Recent Users Links

When viewing a users page there is a block on the right showing the most recent links they have tweeted.

Talkback

On each user page there are 2 columns, the left showing that users tweets and the right showing tweets directed @ that user. This is particularly useful for MP's pages.

House of Commons view

The House of Commons Twitter page has 2 columns. The left shows all tweets by MP's and the right shows any tweets directed at MP's from the community.

Help Spread the Word!

At the top of the site is a green "retweet" button, use this to help spread the word about politwitter. When you are logged in this button is hidden.