Google has teamed with Twitter to provide a Twitter/ Google mashup for Super Tuesday.
Tweets relating to Super Tuesday are overlaid on a Google Map, along with other data including YouChoose ’08 videos, Google News election headlines and primary state results. The site is live here. Google is also offering gadgets with the results as they come in.
Google has tracked big events before in a similar fashion to this, but what’s different here is the tie-in with Twitter. Google acquired Twitter rival Jaiku in October, and we haven’t heard much about Jaiku since, aside from some intermittent reports that the service was stagnating under Google and that users were switching to Twitter. Could this new deal be a recognition by Google that Twitter is where it’s at, its $100 million buy of Jaiku aside? Or was Jaiku simply another tech buy that will be merged into Android and cease to be a Twitter competitor? (Jaiku had a strong mobile platform on top of being simply a Twitter clone.)
Lets hope that either Twitter’s new hosting Verio can handle the traffic, or Google has lent Twitter some server space, otherwise by about 9-10pm EST tonight as solid results start coming through, the only thing we might see on the mashup is an error message similar to the one top right in this post.
