Six Computer Science students from Cambridge have developed TweetGuv, a computer program that analyses the 140-character tweets of politicians to show how in-line with official party policy they are.

The program, which plots the tweets onto a “Triangle of Allegiance” and shows the party with which each individual politician’s statements most closely correspond, is a testament to the important role the internet and social networking have played in the current election.

Over 75,000 tweets have been computed, with a little over half of those having a political nature. Of those, around 72 per cent were in line with party policy, judged using keywords from speeches, debates, and election broadcasts.

The results have shown that 84 per cent of Conservative tweets are apparently faithful to party policy, compared to 79 per cent and 78 per cent of Labour and Liberal Democrat tweets, respectively.

TweetGuv was built by Oliver Chick (Gonville and Caius), Sebastian Eide (St. Edmund’s), Harry Askham (Christ’s), David Reid (Churchill), Jason Bell (Robinson) and Frances Zhang (Trinity), after a lecturer suggested using algorithms to map the tweets of 397 candidates who are signed up on Twitter.

The students are touting it as “an easy way to analyse what candidates are really thinking”. TweetGuv follows in the steps of other political Twitter-centred sites, such as Tweetminster, which serves as a hub for political and election related Tweets.

The program, however, is not without its errors. A tweet by Steven Lambert, a Liberal Democrat, in which he wrote, “So that's his secret. Apparently, David Cameron has little blue pills to help maintain his election,” was classified as being “in line with the policies of the Conservative Party” due to the keywords used.

It is estimated that TweetGuv has a 68 per cent accuracy rate.

Oliver Chick, one of the developers of the program, says he hopes that the site will not be taken “too literally” by voters, but he sees it as a way to become more familiar with individual candidates.

According to Chick, “With the huge media attention, everyone knows the party leaders inside-out, but at the end of the day, it is the PPCs’ names on the ballot paper - not the party leaders. TweetGuv allows voters to find out the ideas and beliefs of the people that they are electing.”

Of the major party leaders, Gordon Brown and David Cameron do not micro-blog on Twitter. Nick Clegg, on the other hand, has over 34,000 followers.

Chick says, “There has been a massive increase of politicians joining Twitter since the start of the election, so this would suggest that it is so that politicians can reach out to the electorate.”

He added, “Are they also trying to seem young and funky? Almost certainly, in my opinion.”

TweetGuv can be found at www.tweetguv.co.uk