From WNYC in New York, this is on the media. I'm Brooke Gladstone.

And I'm Bob Garfield. We have reached the point in our quadrenial cycle when political

pollsters begin to descend on the American people by phone, usually during dinner.

But there's another less intrusive way to track your mood when you're not bothered,

when your views drop unsolicited from your fingertips.

Twitter.

That company has teamed up with Republican and Democratic pollsters,

as well as a social data company called Topsy,

to create a new tool called the Twin Decks,

which offers a new and possibly even more

accurate way to gauge the political leanings of likely voters. Adam Sharp is Twitter's manager

for government and politics. He says the Twin Dex contains a nearly unfathomable amount of data.

Election Day 2008, there were 1.8 million tweets worldwide.

We now see that volume about every six minutes.

And so this now gives us a really deep river to pull tweets out of for study.

While the sample size is obviously vast, it's also not randomized.

Does the composition of the Twitter user base skew the results? For example, does it skew young? Does it skew left? It's important to note that this isn't

measuring the opinions of every user on Twitter. It is measuring the opinions of those who are actively

talking about the campaign or talking about the individual candidates.

So it is skewed. It's skewed towards the politically engaged who are the people who

presumably vote to begin with.

Exactly. And when you recognize that one of the challenges in traditional polling is often

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