For those of you not familiar with the world of Twitter, be happy.  It is kind of a cross between old school away messages and new school facebook status updates.  Basically, on your twitter, you put up little one word sentences or pictures (called “tweets”) that describe what you are doing at any given moment. “Hey, I had eggs for breakfast this morning” or “The guy in front of me in Starbucks right now is annoying” or “here is a picture to demonstrate the color of my toe fungus” or “right now, as you are reading this, I’m dropping a massive deuce”.  As you can see, there’s virtually no reason for this technology to exist! But, then again, since you are reading my blog right now and it is essentially the same thing just in long form; I don’t have much room to complain.

Okay, now that the explanations are out of the way, check this out.  Basically they monitored all superbowl related messages on twitter.  The more a word was mentioned, the larger the word appears on the map. The words also appear on the map geographically where they were sent.  So, for example, you see a lot of “Steelers” up by Pennsylvania and a lot of “Cardinals” down by Arizona. You can hit “play” and walk through time as the game progresses.  Important events of the game are marked on the timeline.  So, for example, right after the Cardinals score, you will see all of a sudden everybody uses the word “Cardinals”.  Boy, as I write that it doesn’t sound that interesting, but I swear it is!  I guess you have to see it.  Also, the words are color coded red or black for the Cardinals or Steelers respectively, where applicable.

You can also mess around with the filters on the left hand side.  My favorite is filtering on player names.  Larry Fitzgerald didn’t do much at the beginning of the game, but then blew up at the end.  So you see his name showing up more and more until it just *explodes* at the end.  A scary one is to do the commercials filter and see what effect the commercials had on the minds of America. And the commercials weren’t even that good this year!

Link courtesy InteractiveReader.