I use a lot of so called web 2.0 social networks like Facebook. But so far I did not understand the necessity of Twitter. Now that changed. I use twitter as a realtime article replacement.
During the pre organization of the Hessian Kick Off Champs I thought about how can we save the feelings right after the end of a match best. First I got in mind, that on a demoparty we would build up a realtime article. So in my case I would have build up a Atari 1040STE and a SC1224 monitor, and load something like 1st Word, so that everybody could write his feelings down.
This is not a bad idea at all, and it’s real retro spirit. But we don’t have such a perfect setup at each tournament, so I was looking for a setup that is available everywhere.
Realtime tweets
No finally I found a usage for Twitter! If you compare Twitter and a realtime article, they have much in common from the technical and usability point of view:
- Short messages
- A date
- You must enter the name in front of a post, to let more than one person use the twitter channel.
But most imoartant, both ways share the some goal: Share the thoughts of a moment to the public.
If there would be no interest in sharing the thoughts to the public, an IRC Channel would be the better solution.
So when the tournament started, I build up a laptop, setup a Kick Off fixture, a Bundesliga live page to keep track of the real world happenings and a Twitter client. I invited everybody to use it and then we start the tournament. Here are the results:
Hessian Champs 2010 realtime tweets
Finale !! 9:01 AM Apr 10th (Frank)
Das 3-3 gegen Pushi war geil. das 3 Tor kurz vor Schluss war verdient. Der anschließende Lob von Pushi war nicht schlecht aber nicht drin. 8:43 AM Apr 10th (Thorsten)
Das 2-1 gegen Jan war nicht schön aber nötig. Jan ist eine Harte Nuss heute für mich. Erstmal nen Äppler, und dann gegen Pushi 8:17 AM Apr10th (Thorsten)
Der BvB kommt jetzt. 6:34 AM Apr 10th (Carsten)
Beim Spiel gegen Horst ging es um nichts mehr, daher war die Luft etwas raus, hauptsache 2-0 gewonnen 6:18 AM Apr 10th via web (Thorsten)
Nach dem 3-2 gegen Frank viel mir nichts mehr ein, sehr Schade. Der eine Dreher der nicht drinnen war, hat das Spiel entschieden 4:45 AM Apr 10th (Thorsten)
Hessisan Kick Off Champs near to begin. We are already 7 People, 1-2 more to come. 3:00 AM Apr 10th (Thorsten)
What lessons did I learned? Well some.
- It’s necessary to put the name in front of the tweet.
- Even that I started with english, at a tournament where only german players participate, it’s no question, of course we tweet in german
- Even that I told myself before to tweet after each game, I missed some 🙂
- The othere players were shy in the beginning but then some of them trying out the new medium.
It would be nice, if other Kick Off players from all over the world could also tweet. I found out, that Twitter itself does not support this feature, but there are plenty of other services around.
Realtime tweets 2.0
I created a Kick Off 2 twitter group at the Tweetworks service. Now next tournament other Kick Off 2 friends who joined these group could also twitter his thoughts on the results (that the real players have to twitter of course).
This will looks like:
Next game was better 🙂 scored the 2-1 with the end of half 1 and in half two finaly everything works. 9-2 in the end.
ThorNpw 14 minutes ago in Kick Off 2
Yust started the training for the Austrian Champs. First game: 4-2 against the computer. I have to get used to Yes|Yes|Yes.
ThorNpw 33 minutes ago in Kick Off 2
The advantage is to have the author in the tweet. During a Tournament, when more than one person uses a twitter account, of course they still have to put their name in front, but if there are different players, each could use their own twitter account. Of course the tournament laptop need maybe a bigger screen to show all their clients, but we will see.
Times changes. It’s not important to do always thee same stuff, but to reach the same goal. So get all the stuff that’s necessary for a realtime system with you is not necessary any more, cause with a twitter client and mobile phones that have browsers, everybody could use twitter as a realtime article replacement.
LowRes 
Leave a Reply