The huge growth of micro-blogging has inevitably led to a host of businesses based on similar ideas.
Some, like Yammer (a private Twitter-like service for use within organisations) have tweaked the idea for niche audiences; while others like FourSquare and Gowalla, have moved towards mobile ‘check in’ applications that let people know what you’re up to and where.
Live events too, have proven an inspiration for many micro-blogging based ideas. Here are a few favourites:
Fantator – Twitter’s Sporty Cousin
Recently launched London-based startup, Fantator, is a micro blogging service that invites users to provide play by play updates (“Fantate”) on live sporting events – these updates are then delivered in a Twitter-like stream that friends can follow.
The founder, Peter Nwankwo, envisages it as a way for fans to get access to untelevised sporting events:
“With some sports matches lacking television and radio coverage which is accessible to millions of sports fans, we hope this joint effort from Fantators around the world will allow fans to stay in the loop”.
But the real benefit might simply be in the added value of the back channel comments – allowing friends to discuss live events (and ones that they’re watching on TV) in real time.
HotPotato – Social Networking for Events
The idea is quite similar in some ways to HotPotato – the ‘social media for events’ startup we profiled recently – that allows users to find events and provide real time commentary.
FestBuzz and HashDash
It’s also not a world away from FestBuzz, the Twitter aggregator for Edinburgh festivals which received some initial funding from 4iP (the public service new media investment fund run by UK TV company Channel 4). In fact, 4iP also funded HashDash who create branded Twitter clients for TV shows, allowing fans to discuss their shows to their heart’s content.
FanPulse – Trash Talking on Your iPhone
We also like the look of FanPulse, an iPhone application that lets you check in to sporting events that you’re watching (live or on TV), “trash-talk” with friends throughout, check out what they’re watching and get live updates for a host of professional sporting leagues and events.
I could go on …
What’s still unanswered is whether users will choose to migrate to event-specific sites rather than form their own little ad hoc groups on Twitter.
A quick Twitter search for “superbowl” gives you more tweets about Sunday’s game than you could ever hope to read. The more Twitter-savvy could easily agree a hashtag with friends or even start a Twitter list to create their own back channel.
A greater opportunity might lie in the data itself.
Rather than simply trying to move the conversation from one site to another, some startups are focused on the enormous amount of data micro-blogging creates. And finding ingenious ways to use it.
FestBuzz, for example, scours Twitter for comments about the Edinburgh festival and then applies what it calls a “unique sentiment classification engine to assign a star rating to a show based on the tweets about it”.
That aggregated content is used to create a crowdsourced ratings site against which advertising is sold. Perhaps more interestingly, they’re also leveraging their technology by charging for access to their API.
In the world of Twitter-like and Twitter-inspired services for events, the real opportunity might lie in the listening rather than the tweeting.
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