The Tweetminster Livewire is a new way to get involved with political news and the debates that shape it. Our easy to use dashboard aggregates political twitter activity and helps you follow breaking news and explore the context that surrounds it. The Livewire helps you engage with the opinions, commentators and political players in stories that matter.

The Tweetminster Livewire blends the power of Twitter with our secret sauce to let you:

Getting started with the Livewire

The Livewire is designed to make it easy for you organise the busy world of online political media into a digestable format. It takes seconds to get the hang of it, here's a few tips for starters:

When you log-in using your Twitter ID, the dashboard is broken into 4 main areas:

1. Search/Tweet bar: At the top of the page are 3 text boxes - Search the Livewire, send Tweets (just like you do on Twitter), and Shorten - which turns long URLs into short versions to use less characters in your tweets.
2. Feed Control panel: The left hand column is where you can select the conversations/topics you want to follow, view the analysis tools and our popular links directory. Use the tabs ('feeds' 'analytics' 'popular links' - which turn orange when your mouse hovers over them) to swap between functions.
3. Display window: The wide central window is where the content you select from the Feed control panel appears. Each new item you choose from the control panel appears in a new tab, which works just like the tabs on Firefox or Internet Explorer. Use the tabs to move between your feeds, close feeds, look at analytics and see the most popular links.
4. Sponsored: The right hand column is the space where advertising, promotions and offers selected for politics fans by the Independent and their advertising partners appears.

What's in the Feed control panel?

Feeds

MPs

All the feeds and tweets from the Members of Parliament that are on Twitter.

PPCs

All the feeds and tweets from the Prospective Parliamentary Candidates that are on Twitter.

News & Comment

The twitter feeds of commentators and political news, from mainstream media to the bloggers, they're all here.

Government & Parliament

The consolidated feeds of Parliament, Downing Street, Government departments and all major parties using Twitter.

Filtered

Filters and aggregates all the feeds and tweets of MPs, PPCs and News &Comment relevant to what's trending, breaking and matters now.

Recommended

Helps you discover new Twitter users based on the connections and network of politicians and commentators.

Tweets

Lists the tweets of your friends.

Replies

Lists all tweets that mention @YOURUSERNAME.

Direct Messages

Lists the direct messages that you have received.

Analytics

Trends

A graph to compare the popularity and occurrence of terms over time. To use the graph, simply insert the terms you wish to compare separating each one with a comma (e.g. Labour, Conservatives, Liberal Democrats). The graph is accompanied by sentiment analysis that displays the most associated terms with the ones you're comparing.

Insight

A set of tools display the most popular terms from the collection of feeds we aggregate, both in real time and historically.

Search

Tweetminster Search lets you browse through all the conversations and feeds that we track and filter these by relevance, party, politician and source. (You can also search using the box at the top of the page too).

Popular Links

That's it. Remember opinions are like votes - they count! If you want to get the most out of the Livewire, get involved - engage in the debate, join the community of voters, journalists and politicians and get tweeting. Don't just watch the breaking news, be a part of it.