What the World Cup has taught us about Twitter

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Don’t let the title fool you, I am not a fan of soccer or the World Cup. However I can’t deny that it has become the largest trending topic across the globe and probably will be until it’s over. It has also showed us a few things about Twitter.

On the bright side, with the placement of the soccer ball and World Cup definition, Twitter may be showing us how their sponsorship will work. When clicking on the logo, you are brought to a live feed of Tweets pertaining to the match or your favorite country.

This live feed is sleek and sexy and could help keep some of the people who lose interest a week or month after they open an account. It can also be a huge asset to brands looking to tie into trending topics or events like the World Cup or awards shows.

Now while I would love to say that everything was rosy for my 140-character addiction, I can’t. Anyone active on the site knows that while the World Cup has served as a real-time update reel of the matches, the added traffic has also run havoc on the servers in Twitter headquarters. This havoc brought back the fail whale and really shoddy APIs that killed productivity and inspired slews of expletives.

Sure the sudden rapid-fire Tweeting is something that will zap bandwidth it is something that Twitter needs to fix. The constant downtime and error messages are a recurring black eye for the company and point of frustration for the users.

Over the next few months the Twitter team can figure out to keep the fail whale on ice and bring in a revenue stream to continue growth and give the guys at Facebook something to pay attention to.

Tommy is my name

it seems like if they were to do the sponsored tweets it would be too similar to what facebook used to do by advertising in the newsfeed... that worked for a while, but eventually they had to move on...

It's an interesting position they've put themselves in to say the least

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jeffespo

All I know is that they are annoying. The sponsored Tweets will need to be mentioned as so to disclose what they are.

It will be interesting to see the different ways twitter monetizes the site. While this sort of sponsorship works, it only works for the people who are updating from the site itself. Because they opened up the API so early in the game, it seems like sponsored tweets are the way to go, but does that seem too obtrusive? And does that call for full disclosure "that this indeed is a sponsored tweet?"

As far as the fail whale goes, it seems like once they've got the monetization issue fixed, getting everything switched over to a cloud with unlimited data could fix that.

On a side note, because of the World Cup and Twitter, I've never been more aware of what a vuvuzela was...

Tweets that mention What the World Cup has taught us about Twitter | Jeff Esposito's Blog -- Topsy.com says:

June 28, 2010 at 5:59 am

[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Social Media Insider and JobShoots, Alltop. Alltop said: What the World Cup has taught us about Twitter http://bit.ly/azwstp Social-Media.alltop [...]

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