MANILA, Philippines - From monitoring the news to keeping in touch with friends and family, the social networking site Twitter has been used for many things.

Now, with the May 10 elections coming up, Pinoys are tweeting about their sentiments on the historic event. One netizen has found a way to gauge who's got the most buzz on the hot microblogging site, via Twitelect.com.

Twitelect.com is a site tracking Twitter trends dedicated solely for the 2010 national elections.

Using Twitter technology, it tracks election-related tweets. By viewing these posts, “Twitelecters” are encouraged to express their views and learn more about Philippine politics.

Candidates with Twitter accounts can even share their platforms and causes.

“It was built to give visitors a general overview of what people are talking about the most at any given time about the Philippine elections,” said site owner and operator Anton Sheker.

Sheker is an executive for a fine furniture company, who works on online experiments during his spare time. He also has an online poll for the elections (http://www.elections.ph) as one of his many Web-based projects.

Twitelect counts the times names and terms are mentioned on Twitter and posts the results on the website.

Concept and design

The tech-savvy 39-year-old was studying how Twitter worked when he decided to make a trending experiment. Sheker chose the elections as a topic due to its timeliness.

“I wanted to make sense of all this Twitter chatter that was lost and buried with other tweets and forgotten forever,” he said. Sheker wanted to compare how online community and traditional media handled the elections.

Since all the posts are fresh from Twitter, they are not monitored, screened, or edited, said Sheker. The graphs in Twitelect’s homepage show the number of tweets about a certain candidate. The trends are available on a seven-day or a 30-day overview.

From initially showing graphs and numbers to adding photos, Sheker devised a filtering system to know whether a particular post was positive or negative. He scanned the ratings based on hash tags such as “#win,” “#ftw,” “#fail,” and “#loser.”

Currently, presidential candidate Gilbert “Gibo” Teodoro is the most tweeted with 758 positive posts and 76 negative posts while Senator Manuel “Mar” Roxas II and Atty Adel Tamano are the most popular vice presidential and senatorial candidates, respectively.

The top 20 Twitelecters are also listed on the site’s homepage. Most of these, notes Sheker, are from media organizations.

Sheker plans to compare the results of the elections with the final Twitelect listing in terms of accuracy. This signals the end of the trending experiment.

Twitelect 2.0?

Sheker did not have success and popularity in mind when he built the site. “The initial project was just a personal one but I put it online for others to see and learn from it… I just wanted it to work well," he said.

“Do I think [Twitelect] reflects the sentiments of the voting population? Maybe not,” he said, adding that the site can be flooded by anyone supporting the candidates. He plans to come up with stricter guidelines for the next elections.

After May, Sheker will maintain the site, making a few alterations. Instead of the Presidentiables graph, he will move the Popularity Contest tab on the home page. The Popularity Contest allows the viewer to compare Twitter results on his personal selection of candidates.