Google + Twitter = Super Tuesday Mashup

There are lots of places to get your Super Tuesday coverage today. Some interesting online mashups I’ve found include The Washington Post’s and Newsweek’s streaming live coverage and MTV’s network of “Choose or Lose” reporters who are live blogging and vlogging from the states where primaries are taking place.

But my favorite so far is the Google Maps mashup that has emerged. It includes a sidebar with an embedded spreadsheet (using Google Gadgets) with primary results across different states, joined by a main window with different “tweets” from users across the country (and many internationally, I’ve noticed).

Some may remember how Twitter put itself “on the map” during the SoCal fires last year by serving as a resource to track fires and get important evacuation details and status to the people who needed it. In that way the social tool proved useful in a specific use case that hadn’t yet been thought of (also see Peter Krasilovsky’s post on how he and his family benefited from various online tools).

Election coverage is likewise a great application for Twitter, albeit a less serendipitous one. It furthermore positions social media as a centerpiece in a news experience and further broadens its value and applicability in the evolving standards of online media.

There are similarly lots of possibilities and lots of ways for Twitter and other social media tools to “grow into” local. In this case, seeing social tools like Twitter explicitly integrated with mapping — something that is inherently local — brings some of these possibilities into focus.

Broadly speaking, others that have integrated social with local in different ways so far include Placeblogger, Topix and Outside.in. And in terms of social networks, we’ve seen some SMBs use MySpace for some time to target local audiences, and Facebook is now clearly chasing this goal too.