Stuck on a train? Twitter to the rescue!

It was a dark weekend for English sport. However, I did discover a new use for Twitter.
Raikkonen's victory
Missing the second half of the Brazillian Grand Prix to get on a train from Leeds back to London, and with Hamilton scrabbling his way up the ranks, I wasn’t relishing the idea of not knowing what was going on. Driving down to the train station, I remembered Twitter’s track feature. Sending “track Hamilton” via SMS switched me on to a barrage of tweets that I was going to have to turn off or end up with a full phone very quickly. At that point I noticed tweets coming from a user called BlogF1, so I sent “follow BlogF1” and “untrack Hamilton”. I had the commentary I needed for the next two hours, although it did appear to stop disconcertingly once Hamilton was out of the game.

When my brother had asked me what I was doing, I replied that I was filtering a global network of conversations for news on Hamilton, from my phone. Which, basically, I was.

This entry was written by jayfresh and posted on October 22, 2007 at 9:07 am and filed under web with tags , , , , , , , , , . Bookmark the permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post. Both comments and trackbacks are currently closed.

4 Comments

  1. I wasn't at your perc%nto presentation
    Posted October 22, 2007 at 11:33 am | Permalink

    a good idea but I think you’re over-indulging in the ‘2.0’ world there, feed to BBC Sport would have provided you with minimal but essential data, plus less txt charges!

  2. Tom
    Posted October 23, 2007 at 8:28 am | Permalink

    and Raikkonnen was ever his usual happy and charismatic self on the podium and in the press conference wasn’t he? Smile dammit, you’ve just won the world championship! 🙂

  3. I wasn't at your perc%nto presentation
    Posted October 24, 2007 at 2:01 pm | Permalink

    ooo it’s decending into an F1 bog now, my contribution. The Ice-man knows to joy, no sorrow, no regrets! I say fair play, he’s always been an amazing driver, but never had the car.

  4. Ollie
    Posted October 26, 2007 at 12:44 am | Permalink

    I’m pleased you found the Tweets useful. I normally slow down towards the end of the race when it is clear who will win in order to start typing up the posts for the site (I’m really not that much of a Hamilton fan 😉 ). Next year though I hope to improve the Twitter commentary so readers aren’t ‘left in the lurch’ at the end. Thanks for reading.