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Twitter As Realtime Sports Reporter
mikejuk writes that a "group of researchers at Rice University think that '[t]he global human population can be regarded as geographically distributed, multimodal sensors.' When it comes to sporting events, it seems that all you have to do is look to the Twitter frequency. The system that they created seems to work for most games. The exception to this is the Super Bowl for the reason that the sheer number of tweets about the game saturated the Twitter distribution system and so they couldn't pick out the maximum in tweet frequencies. They also have some interesting observations on how fast tweets follow an event."
Sports reporting via Twitter makes me think of the stories about Ronald Reagan's broadcasting exploits creating "live" play-by-play based on telegraphed updates — and sometimes the wire went dead. I wonder whether the control-happy local franchises will do anything to prevent in-person fans creating and sharing such instant play-by-play accounts.
http://xkcd.com/723/
Funny may not give karma, but +5 Informative never made anyone snort coffee out their nose.
I've been using Twitter to get realtime high school sports scores for a year or so. It's really the only way I've found to do this because even local news websites don't post scores until hours after a game is over at best, and usually not until the next day.
Collectively, twitter is faster and more accurate than news outlets.
Have you been to an SEC stadium for a football game? No special technology is required to jam the cell phones. The extreme concentration of people with phones usually overwhelms the capacity of the cell networks. The real danger from the conference's perspective is the home viewer tweeting details of each play. Most of the cell activity at the game is people trying to coordinate with family and friends about locations and refreshments, game statistics, or scores from other games. Overall, the last thing the SEC needs to focus on is twitter effect on revenue. Their television contracts are huge in terms of both dollars and ratings. Given the choice of a Twitter feed for updates, television, or the in-stadium experience, even the most casual fan will pick Twitter last.
Twitter, however, is excellent for people trying to keep track of sports from colleges and universities that don't have large television or radio presence. My alma mater is a prime example. It's located in a very rural location and most graduates move far away after graduation. As an FCS/I-AA school, television appearances are rare. Only a couple of radio stations actually air the games. That leaves a streaming audio stream from the campus radio station and Twitter. Twitter has the added bonus of recreating some of community experience since many of my friends might be following along and commenting as things unfold.
Supporting my argument about the cell networks, I went to a game between my alma mater and Tennessee at Neyland Stadium last year. The game wasn't quite a sell-out, but attendance was around 99,000. Doing anything on the cell phone was an exercise in futility.
Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler. - Albert Einstein
I'm not sure how other sports work, but I think each hockey team in the NHL has an official twitter account. So I follow the one for my favorite team. This is actually a pretty big help because I can get info (like injury updates) that I wouldn't normally get while at the game, as well as various info about the team while I'm not at the game.
If what I just said sounded like a troll, it was probably just a failed attempt at humor.