Show HN: speak up via Twitter re. Who should be interim Mayor of San Francisco?

If they (and I'm looking at this site in particular, but it applies to anyone using that design pattern) actually wanted to fix this they'd have the tweet be a reply to @sfvote (or something like that), as opposed to a stand-alone tweet. Doing that would allow your tweet to show up in search results - which allows counting and gauging of opinion - but would only show up to your followers who are also following @sfvote, to whom the tweet would probably be of interest anyways.

The downside of this, from their point of view, is that it makes it much more difficult for the site to really spread (which is clearly their intent). People running this site _want_ your whole contact list to be able to see it (because it opens up a whole new wave of person-to-person advertising) so that more people use it, regardless of how your followers would treat the information.

Maybe add an option along the lines of "Do you want to send this to all your followers?", but even that wouldn't really be in the site's interest.

That's a good point. It's set up so folks can edit their tweet, hopefully making it more relevant to more of their folks, but how many followers will really be in SF or the Bay Area?

A motivation for sites like sfmayorvote.com is that Twitter (and maybe Facebook statuses) potentially offer a new way to measure and visualize public opinion. That's a goal that has huge implications for democratic governance, marketing, etc.

But I'd say Twitter has some design flaws that really limit its usefulness there: for instance, the fact that you can't have both public and protected Tweets on the same account, and the fact that it's not easy to be selective with who receives your Tweet. I'd love to see the Twitter folks add good functionality to address those issues.