People have been talking for some time now about things that Twitter could be doing to add value to the service (apart from just managing to keep the servers up for more than a day or two at a time, which they appear to have accomplished), including mini-hubs about topics that are of intense interest among the Twitterati. The newly-launched U.S. election site is just such a beast, and while it’s a nice effort, there is so much that Twitter could — and should — be doing with it that it’s almost more of an advertisement for what they aren’t doing than for what they are.

The page’s main feature is a scrolling view of Twitter posts that include the names of the candidates, updated more or less in real time. At first, it’s very cool — much like Digg Spy, which shows you things that are being dugg. But it eventually becomes almost hypnotic, to the point where you lose track of what the actual messages are saying. You can pause the scrolling by moving your mouse over the feed, which wasn’t clear until someone pointed it out (on Twitter, of course) and you can click one of the keywords at the top of the page to see a subset of messages with that word, and you can filter the messages by candidate. But that’s about it.

I was hoping for some added intelligence or filtering. What about some trend graphs that show the rise or fall of certain keywords over time? What about a table or a tag cloud showing the most-used keywords for each candidate — like McCain and old, or Palin and dumb, or something like that? I guess we’re just supposed to be amazed that Twitter can produce a scrolling list of messages with certain keywords. The only problem with that, of course, is that others such as Twistori have been doing something similar for months now (and now the site has also launched this).

Twitter founder Biz Stone even mentions some other tools that are far more interesting in his launch post, including Politweets and Perspectv. I’m with Josh Catone at Sitepoint, who says that “it feels like Twitter took the easy way out, when they could have done something really special.” (maybe something like this)

My Canadian blogging colleague Andrew Coyne, whose blog gets about 25,000 pageviews a day or so (according to his sitemeter.com logs), makes a special point of commenting on how all his readers should respect Section 329 of the Canada Elections Act, which prevents any media outlet from reporting the results of polls before all polls are closed. That kind of law isn’t a big deal in a small country, but when there’s a three-and-a-half hour time difference between one side and the other it is a big imposition — not to mention a clear infringement on freedom of speech.

As a law-abiding citizen, Andrew comments in his post that his readers should abide by the law, and that he strongly supports the legislation (this point is repeated several times for emphasis). However, Mr. Coyne also says that he won’t be closing the comments section of his website — and that there is nothing in the legislation that prevents anyone from commenting on a hypothetical election in some non-Canadian country, one that could theoretically be taking place at the same time, with parties that have different names. If readers were to comment in such a hypothetical way, he says, that would seem to be allowed under the law — even if those comments included specifics about polls in this theoretical election.

Will readers take Mr. Coyne up on his challenge? And if they do, will they be creative enough to avoid the scrutiny of Elections Canada? Others have taken on a similar challenge and failed. As technology lawyer Alan Gahtan and my colleague Mark Evans have mentioned, there is always the option of visiting interested foreign outlets. Rob Hyndman also has some thoughts on the topic of the election and the blogosphere.

Update:

It appears that Mr. Coyne has withdrawn from the field of battle without even firing a shot. He has closed his comments until the election is over, on the advice of his legal counsel. Too bad.