Tweeting Sports

Twitter has many uses: communicating with their favorite celebrities/athletes/politicians, product announcements, companies communicating with their employees/customers, people who think the world cares about their trips to McDonalds, etc. The list could go on for days.

One unexpected use of it has been by the news media to scoop breaking news stories faster than other outlets and before they can arrive on the scene with their people/equipment. The 2010 Haiti earthquake broke on Twitter before anywhere else. With all of these uses, what would you believe set the all time record for tweets per second? Sports of course!

Twitter announced on Friday that the following records were set in the 30 seconds following each goal during the World Cup:

1) Japan scores against Cameroon on June 14 in their 1-0 victory (2,940 TPS)
2) Brazil scores their first goal against North Korea in their 2-1 June 14 victory (2,928 TPS)
3) Mexico ties South Africa in their June 11 game (2,704 TPS)

Now that's a lot of tweets! The records did not stand much longer than Mark McGwire's single season home run record though as Lakers fans/bandwagon jumpers set the record shortly after they dismissed the Celtics to win the NBA Championship with 3,085 TPS as the last few seconds ticked off the Boston Three Party's time together.

Twitter's usefulness as a barometer for social trends has been known for about as long as its existence, who knew Ashton Kutcher was so popular? What it is now becoming useful as is a tool of the media to be able to report news without needing the resources they previously did to gather information, results and even stats. Want a sound byte from an athlete? Go to Twitter. Want to know last month's player of the month for the Yankees? Go to Twitter.

Twitter recently started a new advertising system that has promoted trends below the trend stream us twitter users know and love. They also recently started banning ads in stream, an annoying problem that they had to fix. Basically, you can have "Lakers, Celtics, Champs and World Cup" as trends and below them you may have a paid trend for a new movie coming out. Additionally, should a team purchase a promoted trend for its apparel, you would see a promoted trend for it at the top of your search results should you search for the team itself or one of its marquee players.

To quote, and agree, with Mashable CEO and founder Pete Cashmore: Brilliant!

Not only can teams and leagues use this to promote their wares, but Twitter can now start earning that valuable revenue that has eluded it so far. Also, all this can happen without ruining the simple, perfect experience that is a tweet.