How Social Networks Predicted Obama's Win

I wrote a column way back in March suggesting that social networks might be the best predictor of who will win the presidency. Remember, this is back before each party had even nominated its candidate, and the field was wide open. Hillary Clinton was the expected Democratic nominee, for example. At the time, I conducted an analysis that varied from site to site, and included Digg, MySpace and Facebook, to see which of the candidates the social sites preferred. I also suggested that if social sites ended up accurately predicting who would win, they might be taken seriously by future pundits when guesstimating who is likely to be elected in the future. Back then, as you can read in my article, SOCIAL SITES PREDICTED A LANDSLIDE BY OBAMA.