Twitip

There were a lot of things that were new to the World Cup 2010. Of all the things that were new, one of it was the fact that this was the first World Cup after the onset of the Twitter fever.

A few days back I read a post somewhere that talked about Twitter having set a new record of about 3.2K tweets per second, thanks to the Japanese football fans. That is more than evidence that Twitter has changed the way we saw the World Cup.

Twitter certainly gave us a different view of the World Cup this time. It was the match between Brazil and Chile. I wanted to get an update into the match and before I could get an update from any other website, I could get it from Twitter. I was continuously updated about the match. All I had to do was search Twitter with a few hash-tags like #brazil and #football. I could get the latest on the world cup. Just imagine the amount of tweets surfacing on Twitter every second.

Twitter showed us all a glimpse of their “promoted Tweets” just before the USA-Ghana match. Searches with hash-tags of #USA, gave results with a promoted tweet being the first results. This tweet was from Nike Soccer. It was there until the game was over and then they pulled it off. But, one sure got to know how Twitter’s promoted tweets are going to look like.

Twitter has influenced us in more than one ways. World Cup football is one such thing, but a macroscopic view shows that it was not just confined to the World Cup. Twitter is a more important member of our Internet family, more important than even Google. Or, so at least for me. Why?

1. Because I can get updated news feeds on Twitter, much faster than Google.
2. Because I am able to market my products on Twitter at zero cost, in comparison to the thousands that I would have spent at Google.
3. Because I have been able to make some good friends at Twitter.
4. Because Twitter is fun and Google is not.
5. Because I can research about anything that I wish to sell, much easily at Twitter than Google.

These are just some of the things in addition to the searches on Twitter. Carefully built search parameters can get you the desired results extremely easily and much faster than Google. What’s more, you can even save the search for future so that you do not have to write the query again and again. How useful is this? It depends upon your purpose of the search. It saves a lot of time if you are researching your market and that is where I think it is pretty useful.

As the World Cup nears its finale, it would be not be wrong to say that, at least Twitter has stamped its authority as a news channel. Twitter has given us a new perspective to the way news was read. Staying updated has a new meaning and I am sure that this World Cup will be remembered as a “Twitterified World Cup”