Tweetcast: web tool predicts whether Twitter users are Romney or Obama voters

Twitter can now tell you who your friends are voting for today. Sort of.
Tweetcast, unveiled last week by the folks at the Knight News Innovation Lab at Northwestern University, predicts whether a Twitter user is voting for Barack Obama or Mitt Romney by analyzing that person’s tweeting activity.
Try out Tweetcast here.

It works by examining the words, hashtags, websites and usernames in the tweets of “known political supporters and compares those to the same elements in the feeds of other potential voters,” according to the Knight Lab blog.
“The system is most accurate — about 80 percent — with users who tweet about political issues. It’s less accurate — about 65 percent — with users who aren’t obviously political,” says Shawn O’Banion, a Northwestern University PhD student who helped create the Tweetcast technology.