FaceBook and Google "prediction"- Barack Obama wins?

This blog post in Norwegian has checked Google Trends and search activity on the two different candidates, and comes out with Barack Obama ahead with a latest trend of John McCain in front in the last week or so. The blog poster points out that the fans of Barack Obama might be more active on Internet. If this is true the same weakness is in this short check on Facebook.

The above mentioned Blog post looks at trends on searches within USA, putting them close, but with Barack ahead until the latest week or so. It remains to see if this trend carries on.

The short manual check comes out with the following; looking at the biggest groups on FaceBook. This is based upon a simple search on candidates names and looking at groups and fan-pages.

	Fan Page	Largest group	New members	Topics	Against group	New members	Topics against
Obama	1 706 138	670 076	8 731	505	148 472	3 138	186
McCain	299 157	50 960	3 563	43	17 520	1 269	12

Some comments looking at this table and having the above mentioned blog post in mind:

If we look at the polls which are presented in main stream media where these two candidates are very close are correct, then we can conclude that Barack Obama followers are much more present on Internet?

We should also remember that many joining these pages are from other countries than USA.

Should we then conclude that Barack is the most popular candidate in the rest of the world?

If the race is close; what do many people in USA look different upon, than the rest of the world?

Could it be that the race isn't as close as the polls?

If the latest trends where John McCain is gaining continues will we see the same in the rest of the world?