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A month ago Kwwika, a real-time data streaming service provider annonced a competition to build a mash up that uses their World Cup 2010 Twitter streams. I've decided to enter the competition and visualize the stream of tweets in a fun and engaging way. As the competition closed on 11th July, my entry was selected as one of the winners!

The Entry

My entry, Tweet For Your Team shows the tweets of the two teams simultaneously. It measures the live intensity of the tweets (how many are written per minute for each team) and also analyzes their mood by matching keywords and using simple rules to decide whether a tweet carries positive or negative emotions for the team.

The entry also allows visitors to get involved and cheer for or against their team with a single click sending a shout visible to other users off the application. See this post on all the details on the application functionality.

Winners of the competition were announced just before the World Cup 2010 final and I was happy to see my entry being selected one of the two winners. As the judging panel wrote in their summary: "Gergely created a really engaging application that you could easily sit and watch and interact with during any live World Cup match."

Why Silverlight?

I've used Silverlight to implement the application on top of the live streams. Silverlight turned out to be a great choice for implementing this application for several reasons.

Development time

It took a total of a few days to develop the application, however I was able to finish a working prototype of the application rapidly, in less than 8 hours. From there on I've spent most of the time working on the visuals and improving the mood determining algorithm.

Silverlight is indeed great for prototyping quickly and thanks to it's separated view and code behind concern, it's quite easy to radically modify the looks of an application down the line.

Performance

During games, the application had quite high load: up to 3500 tweets per minute were coming in per team. This meant up to 10 updates per second on the application interface which Silverlight dealt with surprisingly well after a few tweaks.

Media and Effects

Adding media and visual effects to the application is really easy and quick with Silverlight. I've decided late down the road to add some sound effects whenever someone was cheering and vuvuzela background music - all done in a few lines. Also, stunning visual effects can be achieved by using animations and playing with the opacity of elements. I was able to spice the feel of my application up in a few hours of time.

Summary

Silverlight turned out to be an efficient way of creating a visually appealing and performant World Cup mashup in a short period of time. World Cup 2010 is over, so the application isn't as intense as it was during the games, but I'd still encourage you to take a look at it or watch the video recorded during one of the World Cup games.