Kosmix Tweatbeat is Australia’s Real-Time Source for World Cup Action
Tweetbeat World Cup filters Twitter to show what’s happening in the tournament right now
Sydney, Australia, 18th June 2010: Socceroos fans can now keep track of every second of the action in South Africa, with the introduction of Tweetbeat World Cup, a new Twitter filter from Kosmix. Tweetbeat World Cup filters Twitter in real-time to give fans the best commentary, news and opinions about the games, and to show what people are saying about the tournament right now.
Tweetbeat scans up to 2000 tweets per second—more than 65 million tweets each day—to identify the most interesting and important comments about the FIFA World Cup™. Tweetbeat then organises these comments and presents them in real-time, so football fans can follow their team, see the most popular tweets trending now, and read what people are saying about the competition. A speed slider lets you speed up or slow down the flow of tweets displayed on the page, and a scoreboard shows which team has the most Twitter buzz for each game. Fans can retweet the best comments or follow other Twitter users right from the site. A mobile version of Tweetbeat is also available for the iPhone.
How Tweetbeat Works
Kosmix, the creator of Tweetbeat World Cup, has taken a semantic approach to filtering Twitter. Kosmix is one of the few companies with access to the complete Twitter firehose, and it has developed Tweetbeat by running the full Twitter stream through its categorisation engine. With more than 10 million nodes, the Kosmix categorisation engine is among the largest taxonomies of the Web and understands the relationship between things to an unprecedented degree. As a result, Tweetbeat World Cup goes beyond keywords or hashtags to surface tweets about the tournament, teams, players, stadiums and fans—even if the tweet does not contain the term “World Cup.”
Tweetbeat ranks tweets about the World Cup to eliminate spam, reduce the noise and to show what’s resonating right now. Tweet ranking is automatically determined by measuring a variety of signals including the number of retweets, who tweeted and retweeted, how many similar stories are trending up, and how fast the tweet topic is growing.
Kosmix is applying these techniques to the World Cup teams and players as a showcase of what its technology can do. Later this year the company will release a full version of Tweetbeat across all topics.
Tweetbeat World Cup Twitter Stats
According to Kosmix, since the beginning of the tournament the Socceroos have been tweeted 72,464[i] times, the 5th most tweeted team in the tournament, amongst a total of 2,448,988 tweets about the World Cup. This number is expected to jump dramatically as the Socceroos take on Ghana on Sunday morning. Additional key statistics[ii] include:
- The England team is the most tweeted so far with 178,055 tweets
- In second place is the USA and Brazil, with 163,818 and 128,760 respectively
- The most tweeted player is Argentinean, Lionel Messi with 39,083
- Whilst Portugese star, Christiano Ronaldo has been tweeted about 32,108 times and is the second most tweeted player
- Tim Cahill is the Socceroos’ most tweeted player at 17th with 6,359 tweets
Quotes from Kosmix Co-Founder Anand Rajaraman
“Because we show you only the most interesting and important tweets, you’ll never see comments about what someone in the stands is having for lunch…unless that someone happens to be Maradona,”
“Very few other services have access to the Twitter firehose and offer the type of language processing Tweetbeat does. For the World Cup, our taxonomy, which has been under development for five years, knows the players, their nicknames, the teams they play for, past players, World Cup stadiums and much more. For example, we’d recognise a tweet about Harry Kewell as a tweet about the World Cup and the Socceroos. And if @Socceroos tweets, the tweet will appear in Tweetbeat’s real-time stream with no measurable delay. Most World Cup filters and widgets rely on hashtags such as #WC2010 which miss important tweets and are susceptible to spam tweets.”
“Tweetbeat World Cup is most fun when a match is happening because you can see what people are saying about the game as it’s played whether you’re at home, at a World Cup party, or the pub.”
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