TweetProgress Can Bring More Progressives to Twitter

“was hatched up by @jgilliam, @myrnatheminx, @jdp23 and @ginacooper to bring more progressives on Twitter, and better connect the ones who are.”

A while back we did a quick hit about how Twitter is old … er .. more middle aged… people who live in urban areas.  And Politico did a piece about how more GOP elected officials are on Twitter.  This is sad.

So the Folks at TweetProgress decided to fix it.  Tracy – aka @myrnatheminx – was the co-founder (along with Jon Pincus) of the hashtag #p2 which basically stands for progressive 2.0 and simply serves as a much shorter tag than something like #topprog or even #tcot but helps us keep tabs on progressive tweets that should be retweeted.  The website is a catalogs of all progressive tweeters who might want to be linked to other progressives.

“We want to help progressives find each other on Twitter and coalesce around progressive issues and actions,” TweetProgress co-founder Tracy Viselli told The Hill. “There is a huge pool of progressives out there doing very cool stuff already on Twitter, but not everyone knows about what they are doing. We hope to use TweetProgress to do that.”The site went live just in the last couple days-against the intentions of Viselli and the site’s co-founders. . .

“I think we’ve always seen ourselves as different from conservatives on Twitter,” Viselli said. “First, TweetProgress is not built around there being an elite like [#]TCOT is. We want everyone to join the progressive fold and help us get our message across.”

As you can see the real goal of TweetProgress is to allow newbie twitter folks to join and find mentors who are already established twitter’ers and can help them learn the ropes of progressive tweeting.  Another goal is for #p2 folks to reach out to other progressives who don’t know about all of the great work that is being done on Twitter to help progressive activism.

While more GOP elected officials might be more prominent or more noisy on Twitter, TweetProgress is banking on the millions of other users who just don’t know the impact they can have if they join the cause.I think this is a great opportunity to also bring more young people to twitter.  While so many young people prefer facebook or myspace as a means of updating their status, you can download apps to your iPhone for Twitter and you can sync your twitter account to your Facebook account so it feeds directly into your status update.  That way you don’t have to navigate that detailed interface while going 80mph down the highway… … not .. that I’ve done that….. …. ….

If you work with a cause, an organization, or candidate I wrote a few weeks ago about some of the most successful tweeting campaigns I’ve been grateful to worked with.  And Kevin Bondelli’s All Inclusive Guide to Twitter can be found here too.  And if that isn’t enough of a ringing endorsement of why you should join Twitter or join TweetProgress… then the coolest thing is that Al Gore signed up for it.