The World Cup is on course to become a watershed event for social media networking, but popular micro blogging site Twitter has been struggling to cope.
So popular has the platform become since its launch in 2006 that even Fifa president Sepp Blatter has opened an account to “connect with football fans” during the tournament.
“It is the first Fifa World Cup in which social media websites will play an important role in connecting everyone who cares about the game of football,” he said.
Fifa is also providing World Cup match updates via Twitter, and many players have been getting in on the act.
But traffic spikes have overwhelmed capacity, exposing internal flaws, as record numbers of people tweet.
Twitter saw the potential of one of the biggest sporting events in the world and set up its own site featuring a continuous stream of “top tweets”, messages from players, teams and others.
Users can also isolate messages from regular Twitter users by individual match or team and it published a list of suggested accounts to follow during the tournament.
But it was not available at times on Wednesday, with a picture of a whale — known as the “fail whale” — appearing instead with the message “Twitter is over capacity”.
The outages have been coming thick and fast, spoiling the e xperience for fans.
“We’re working through tweaks to our system in order to provide greater stability at a time when we’re facing record traffic,” said Twitter spokesman Sean Garrett.
“We have long-term solutions that we are working towards, but in the meantime, we are making real-time adjustments so that we can grow our capacity and avoid outages during the World Cup.”
When they can, players have been tweeting on the tournament, including Brazil’s Kaka and Luis Fabiano, France’s Nicolas Anelka, Uruguay’s Diego Forlan and about half of the US team.
Even players who are not in SA are joining in, including regular tweeters, Brazilian greats Ronaldo and Ronaldinho.
Some national coaches though don’t like the distraction and have banned their players from all social networking sites — Twitter and Facebook included. — Sapa-AFP
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