Via Joe Trippi, the site Tech President reports that the New York City Democratic Primary made heavy and (in some cases) innovative uses of Twitter.

Joe asked in his tweet whether Twitter will be used to predict the outcomes of elections and primaries. For example, the initial winner of the NYC primary, Bill DiBlasio, had over 3,2600 Twitter followers and Facebook fans, compared to his main rival Mark Green with only 445.

The race seems interesting (although this is the first time I’ve heard of it) because the losing candidate, Green, used Twitter to release “100 new ideas for a better city”.

As Twitter and other social networking becomes more pervasive, I think it is likely that we will see analysts doing Twitter searches and other “live” searches to gauge support.

In other news…

California Governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger, recently launched a new site based on Twitter to share new ideas for California. Called MyIdea4CA, the site allows citizens to send hashtaged tweets to the site under various headings.

The interesting thing about the site is that visitors can vote up or down each idea submitted to the site, in a similar manner to Digg’s voting system. I believe Obama did something along these lines when he was President-elect.