This World Cup has been exciting for me not just because of the great games but also because during the group stages I’ve been building a cool real time spectator monitoring application for it: Tweet For Your Team (powered by Kwwika real time data services).
What does it do?
The application streams tweets live from the two teams playing live or playing the next game (using the Kwwika service). It also shows the live score on the top (provided by Opta), so even if you’re not in front of a telly, you can be aware of it. Now, for the fun part…

The app monitors the tweet intensity, that is the number of tweets per minute for each side. Hours before the game this value is typically around 5-10/minute, right before the game it’s usually at least 300/minute and from there it pretty well reflects how nerve wracking the game is. The highest number I’ve experienced up to the semi finals. was around 3500/minute for Spain, when they shot – and missed – the second penalty against Paraguay in the quarter finals.

Tweet intensity is an interesting indicator, but an even more useful one is the mood meter. The application tries to evaluate the mood of each tweet coming in and decide whether it is more of a positive message (“yaaay!!”) or a negative one (“boooo!”). The tweets are colored according to this: red ones mean negative, green ones positive and yellow is neutral (or at least the application couldn’t decide).
Tweet intensity tends to pretty well reflect on the game: usually when a team is scored a goal it tends to go down… though it’s hard to predict by how much – sometimes the fans just keep sending positive messages to the team even after their team has gotten behind!
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