The election, and politics generally, is one of the bigger topics on twitter. Now the company has made it the biggest–or at least most visible–by creating a page dedicated to tweets about the election, particularly the presidential debate tonight. It’s really worth a look. There’s more than an update a second, pulled from the public time-line (all the updates, or "tweets") by a filter that identifies them as relevant to the campaign.

This is the first such sub-section for twitter, and it might point the way that the company is headed. Especially in the context of real-time events, like the debates, this approach makes sense: a lot of people are very actively updating about something everyone is paying attention to. This is an attempt to create a real community wide discussion among everyone on the service whose tweeting about the debate. It’ll be interesting to see how it goes.

But imagine similar pages about sports events or popular TV shows. The instant reaction of viewers would be transparently on display. It would be clear what people liked and what they didn’t. The dream of twitter as an enormous focus group starts to make sense once activity is broken down into categories.

But there’s still a big problem. We’ve noted here before that the twitter using population isn’t exactly typical. In mentioning the new twitter feature, the New York Times Caucus Blog describes twitter-ers as "techno-hipsters"–an interesting shift in tone from the conventional wisdom about the service a year or two ago: that it was mainly used by Silicon Valley industry types and young children.

Now, the "twitter-verse" is starting to look more like the blogosphere (something we’ve also mentioned before). There’s a diverse set of still somewhat off-beat, usually younger users and distinct domains of activity that can be identified. It should be no surprise that the first one to be carved out this way by the service itself is politics. While politics isn’t the oldest or even necessarily the biggest subject on the web, it was important in the popularization of the blogosphere–you hear a lot more about political blogs than you do about any other sort.

And all of this raises the question: is it worth it to talk about twitter as a nascent public sphere? Certainly that idea has swirled around blogs for a while now–the idea that they represent a free and public political discourse that isn’t possible in the one-to-many, traditional media format. But there’s a strong case that political blogs contribute to an ever starker and starker political divide. The online left and right are largely preoccupied with their own opinions, usually ones about demonizing the other side. The blogosphere hardly resembles a meaningful exchange of ideas most of the time. Is there any reason to think twitter will be different?

Well, that’s the interesting thing about the election site that twitter has set up: it’s not what some people are saying about the election (or, tonight, the debate), it’s what all the people are saying about it. It’s easy to only visit blogs you agree with; here you’ll have no choice but to see what everyone is saying. Now, this isn’t likely to change a lot of minds about anything and 140 characters isn’t quite long enough to make an effective policy pitch, but there’s still something radical in all this. Will strangers respond to each other? Will there be sniping between supporters of the different candidates? Could it get heated? Is it possible that all the "techno-hipsters" turn out to be Obama supporters? (Obama–or his campaign, really–has 85,446 followers on twitter, McCain seems to have 532) Will a consensus winner emerge? Will people be fact-checking what the candidates say? Will anything worth talking about outside of twitter happen?

Hard to know. You’ll have to follow (or take part in)  the tweets during the debate tonight.