Overview
SportSense examines tweets posted by NFL fans to infer what is happening in a game and how excited the fans are. It does so in real-time and provides visualized results for Live Games. Results for old games can be found in Recaps .
SportSense is part of a larger project that aims to utilize people as "sensors" to infer what is happening in the physical world and what people feel about it. What happens in an NFL game, e.g., a touchdown, a field goal, or a fumble, excites the fans in various ways. Some of the fans then use tweets to express themselves. SportSense examines these tweets to infer the sentiments of these fans and subsequently recognize the game events.
How To
See how to interpret the results and how to see the results for an old game on How To page.
News
Super Bowl Madness
In the Super Bowl on Sunday, a record 12,233 tweets per second was observed at the end of the game, according to Twitter. Millions of tweets were sent during the game when Giants defeat Patriots.
From SportSense data, Giants attracted 50% more tweets than Patriots did during the 4-hour game time. The continued talk about Giants' victory made this difference even larger to ~70%. Even during the game time, Giants fans were more positive than Patriots fans. Half of tweets mentioned Giants also conveyed positive sentiments while only one third of tweets mentioned Patriots did so.
In addition, SportSense started using a whole new visualization for the game trend, putting three trend lines into one figure. Plus, selected live tweets are shown on the webpage.
Houston Texans champs the AFC South for the first time in nine-year history
Houston Texans beat the Cincinnati Bengals 20-19, at the same time, Saints stopped the Titans in the final seconds. Texans champs the AFC South for the first time in nine-year history of the team. SportSense observed a huge amount of tweets at the end of both games. After three quarters, Houston at Bengals game only has two thirds of total tweets compared to the Saints at Titans game. When the both games end, tweets related to Houston Texans flooded which even the total number of tweets in both games. See Recaps for the tweets trends of both games.
12/12/2011Web, iPhone and Android top the Twitter clients in the first 12 weeks
There are various ways to post tweets and there are numerous clients for different devices. Which ones are the most popular Twitter clients for NFL fans? After the first 12 weeks games, we summarize the most popular Twitter clients which are shown in the figure below. 25% of users post tweets directly from Twitter website (web), followed by iPhone ~20% and Android ~11%. In addition, more tweets are posted from mobile devices. Specifically, one out of two tweets is posted from the Twitter client on mobile devices.
Cowboys, Eagles, Lions top NFL tweets midway through season
Midway through the NFL season, the Cowboys are the most tweeted NFL team during game action with an average of 12 tweets per second (TPS) or 1.1 million for the first half of the season. The Eagles were a close second at 11 TPS. The Lions, with their surprise 6-2 start, and the New Orleans Saints average nine TPS, with the Lions squeaking out third place with a higher total number of tweets. (Rice News Release)
11/09/2011Undefeated Detroit Lions (5-0)
Detroit Lions is undefeated through five games for the first time since 1956. Detroit Lions' first Monday Night Football appearance in a decade. The record-setting crowd, the head-splitting noise. Undoubtedly, the Monday Night Football between Detroit Lions and Chicago Bears is the most exciting game on Twitter of Week 5.
On Sunday, the most exciting games on Twitter include Green Bay Packers vs Atlanta Falcons (Sunday Night Football), New York Jets vs New England Patriots.
10/14/2011People pay tribute to Steve Jobs on Twitter
As the news of the passing of Steve Jobs spread on Wednesday afternoon, Sportsense monitored a huge volume of tweets related to this news. We estimate the TPS (Tweets per second) exceeds any sports such as the Super Bowl (4,064 TPS) and Worldcup Final (3,051 TPS). It is very likely to break the all-time record of 6,939 TPS. Remember two years ago, on June 25, 2009 when Michael Jackson died, the number, 456 TPS, was a record at that time.
Even about 24 hours after the news, people are still actively tweeting about the news. The TPS is as many as the most exciting game on last Sunday between Detroit Lions and Dallas Cowboys.
As we are limited by the Twitter API, we provide the results based on a projected trend.
10/07/2011The Sportsense API(Beta) is now available.
09/18/20112011 NFL kickoff is only 2 days away! The pre-season games recaps are available in the Recaps .
09/06/2011Follow us or leave comments on Twitter, Sportsensor.
12/06/2010Test run starts
11/21/2010