Olympics fans asked not to tweet during events
London 2012 has been described as the first true “social media games”, with sports fans tweeting, texting and sending photos and videos live from events. But on Sunday it became clear that all this activity placed a strain on the networks when a deluge of messages sent by fans lining the streets to watch the men’s cycling road race prevented TV commentators from telling how far ahead the leaders were.
The problem, apparently with one so-far unidentified provider, stopped data from the cyclists’ GPS satellite navigation system getting through to the studios, leading to confusion. The International Olympic Committee (IOC) was forced to ask enthusiastic tweeters to limit the sending of non-vital messages -- at least until more network capacity could be arranged.
Free Wi-Fi comes to London in time for the Olympics
Virgin Media has already introduced free Wi-Fi to selected Underground stations -- with more to be added by the end of the year -- and now O2 is doing its bit to transform London into Europe’s largest free Wi-Fi zone with a roll out of hotspots at numerous landmarks across the city.
Free to access and use, irrespective of what network you’re on, the hotspots are already available at Oxford Street, Regent Street, Trafalgar Square, Leicester Square, Piccadilly Circus and Parliament Square, with Covent Garden to be added soon. The first time you connect you’ll need to register your details, but after that you’ll be automatically connected whenever you get within range of a signal. Assuming, of course, that O2 doesn't suffer another network disruption like the one it experienced recently.
Olympic tweets to power a daily light show on the London Eye
EDF Energy, the official electricity supplier of the London 2012 Olympics, will be using tweets sent during the games to gage the “Energy of the Nation”.
The power company will scour the raw Twitter feed looking for content, hash tags and links that relate to the Olympics (and which originate from within the United Kingdom), which it will then analyze using an algorithm designed by Professor Mike Thelwall, from the University of Wolverhampton, and Sosolimited a team of linguistic and data visualization experts from MIT. This algorithm will extract positive and negative words, phrases and emoticons from the tweets and generate an hourly percentage showing how positive (or otherwise) British people are feeling about the games.