Greg Does IT

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!

As mentioned before the application streams data in real time. When a game is on this literally means thousands of updates per second on the screen which is enough to make anyone dizzy after a few minutes. Because of this only turn the update speed up to real time if you’re ready for it!

Update: the application has been extended with new functionality. See this post on the new features.

The following video shows the application working during the Argentina-Germany semi-final:

How Does It Work?

The application does not poll the Twitter API directly, instead, it uses Kwwika, a newly launched real-time data delivery service. Kwwika takes care of gathering the data real time and streams it directly to the client application. Real-time match data is streamed by Opta live sports data through the Kwwika service as well.

The application is built in Silverlight. I could have chosen HTML5 + Javascript implementation as well as Kwwika provides a JSON API. However having experienced the update speed it’s safe to say that Silverlight was a good choice performance wise: it took some tweaking to be able to seamlessly visualize up to 50 updates per second on the screen.

Can I see it?

Visit Tweet For Your Team to try out the application. Since this is a live service, you’ll see the most action if you go right before or during the games – be sure to check it out during the semi-finals and the finals of the World Cup!

The application was originally built for the Kwwika World Cup 2010 Real-Time Push Web App competition sponsored by TellyLinks.com – wish me luck so that it will succeed there!

This entry was posted on Monday, July 5th, 2010 at 2:23 pm and is filed under Silverlight. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.