Joe Hart officially named Twitter's man of the match.

England vs. Italy, 24th June 2012...

88,142 tweets mentioning "England"...

Analysed for positive or negative sentiment and then used to rate each player's performance.

The result? Joe Hart was England's man of the match based on tweets that mentioned player names. Ashley Young was, erm, less good.

Instead of the usual static infographic, here's a Tableau dashboard! Don't forget to click on the different pages across the top. Go here for overall England ratings, player scores and interactive player performance over time.

A few interesting bits that popped out for me...

• Rooney's performance was nowhere near his pre-match expectation (check his time-line)
  
  
• We all got progressively more depressed about England as the game went on. Have a look at sentiment over time and compare the pre-game level with the decline over the next two hours.
  
  
• We were happy to make half time and greeted the second half with a big COME ON ENGLAND! Then went back to getting steadily more depressed again.
  
  
• Cole's been harshly treated for that penalty miss. He scores a low rating due to the large volume of negatives as England exit on penalties
  
  
• Nobody tweets about poor old Lescott! That probably means as a centre back that you're getting the job done. I thought he had a good game.

If you want to see some methodology, it's the same as I did for England vs. Sweden.

Rating England vs. Sweden using Twitter

If you follow me on Twitter (why would you not? Don't answer that) you'll know I've been playing with R a lot recently. First attempts at pulling data from Twitter resulted in a word cloud I quite liked, but which an ex-colleague dubbed the "mullet of the internet". Thanks Mark.

This time, I've pointed R at Euro 2012. Specifically, I set R running from half an hour before kick off in the Group D England vs. Sweden game - 19.30 last Friday - with instructions to pull every tweet it could that contained the word "England".

The results? 78,045 England related tweets (excluding re-tweets), running from 19.30 to 21.15.

Let's see what we got. Grouping up the tweets into 5 minute intervals, here's overall volume.

We're averaging just under 2,300 tweets every 5 minutes. That's got to be enough to do something interesting with!

It's a bit easier to read if you colour the first and second half in red, with pre and post game and half time in grey.

OK, so lots of Tweets then. One of the cool things we can do with them is to split the tweets by sentiment; positive, negative or neutral. An example of a strong positive from the database would be:

"Well done and very proud of you. England may not have the most talented players but they played with guts, passion and heart #England" @ozzy_kopite

And negative (no points for grammar here either):

"Now lets watch england lose bcoz they use caroll!!! N the game will b bored!!! #damn" @Anomoshie

The sentiment algorithm isn't perfect so we're not going to push it too hard. I'm dumping any data about the strength of sentiment, tweets are either positive, negative or neutral and that's it.

If you'd like to know what kit I used to do all of this, please see the bottom of the post. I'm assuming most readers just want to jump to results, so here we go.

Keep the five minute time-slots and divide the number of positive tweets by the number of negative, to get a view on how cheerful Twitter was feeling about England during the game.

On average, there are 2.8 times as many positive tweets as negative. That will partly be down to the settings on the sentiment algorithm though and it's the movements we're really interested in.

Twitter was very positive in the lead up to kick off, but that didn't last long. Twenty minutes in, the balance of positive over negative had dropped from 4.1 to 2.2 as Sweden failed to roll over and let England hammer them. Then Carroll scored the opener...

In the second half, we can see a trough all the way down to 2.0 as Sweden take the lead and then a positive swing via England goals from Walcott and Welbeck. The game ends on a positive / negative sentiment value of 2.9. Well played lads.

Come to think of it, well played which lads? We've got loads of mentions of the players in this database too, so let's see who Twitter thinks had a good game.

Height of the bars is positive / negative sentiment and width is volume of tweets (some players like Lescott generate really low volumes so don't take their rating too seriously.) I've restricted the database just to tweets that took place  during the first or second half. If you were slating Carroll before the game, we're not interested in your opinion here!

Carroll comes out man of the match, both in terms of sentiment and volume of tweets. There's a definite break between the players who did best - Carroll, Welbeck, Gerrard, Hart and Walcott - and everyone else. The overall England rating never goes negative (below 1,) and none of the players' ratings do either, although Johnson tries hardest, which may be a reflection of his own-goal.

Finally, let's see how the player ratings fluctuated during the game. Sentiment on top. Volume of tweets below. This doesn't work so well for players with low numbers of mentions in tweets but you can see it works for Andy Carroll. That huge volume spike is his goal.

One more; here's Gerrard. Game of two halves for the Liverpool midfielder and his rating dropped significantly after half time.

Want to see another player? Here they are - knock yourself out. If you select "False" it will show totals for tweets that either don't mention a player, or mention more than one. The chart is a bit squashed below to fit in with the Wallpapering Fog template. For bigger, go here.

Powered by Tableau

Tools:

Tweet database pulled using R, R Studio and TwitteR. Sentiment analysis using the R 'Sentiment' plugin. Cleaned up a little in Excel and then all the charts are Tableau.

A happy data visualisation

As a side project this week, I've been learning how to get data out of Twitter using R. How it's done might be a post for another day (it's not really difficult, except for R's usual quirks...)

For now, here's a Wordle picture of Twitter in a happy mood, searched for "Bank Holiday" at 5pm on the Friday before a long weekend. Have a great break everyone.

Quick conclusions from the riot coverage

I watched the riot coverage across a variety of outlets until too late last night. Here are a few thoughts...

• The rioters didn't organise using Twitter, they used Blackberry Messenger. People watching used Twitter.
  
  
• Did you hear that Daily Mail? BBM and Twitter are not the same thing.
  
  
• During a developing story, Twitter > Sky News > BBC News
  
  
• During a developing story, you're better off following interesting journalists on Twitter than reading the content of theirs that makes newspaper websites
  
  
• If TV news channels haven't got helicopters up, they won't be showing any coverage that you haven't already seen
  
  
• Somebody really needs to tell our news outlets about UStream
  
  
• What happened to webcams? I swear there used to be more.
  
  
• If it was truly Armageddon, somebody would still be posting marketing news to your Twitter feed.
  
  

Most misleading. Headline. Ever.

Eight in ten people use Twitter for business purposes says the IAB. Lets face it, that's not even slightly plausible.

Reading the article, you find that the Kamaron Institute surveyed three hundred Twitter users, so it should read eight in ten Twitter users.

That's probably about right, when you consider that Twitter is rapidly turning into a tool for the marketing industry to talk to itself and for spammers to talk to the marketing industry.

The IAB has written some guidelines, for brands wanting to use Twitter too.

But I prefer these: http://www.howtousetwitterformarketingandpr.com/

This is how you tweet your brand

We spent some time not long ago evaluating a piece of software called Confluence. It's a cool intranet engine that lets you share with colleagues through wikis.


One of the guys playing with the software got frustrated that it wouldn't let him do something complicated with HTML and, as you do, he tweeted that Confluence was winding him up. Just throwing the frustration out into the ether along with eveybody else's random thoughts.

Sombody at Confluence picked up that there was a tweet about them, and mailed back directly saying yes it could be done and here's how. You don't forget service like that - we hadn't even asked for help and a small negative PR message on Twitter turns into two vocal advocates for Confluence.

Is this a small company thing? I have to say I think it is and there's a good chance that Twitter will work best as a tool for smaller companies - either extremely local or extremely niche, or both. The long-tail without a body.

I don't get it. Maybe I'm not web 2.0 enough?

Skittles has launched a kind of aggregator site for its brand.

If you visit www.skittles.com, you're greeted with an ever-present hovering menu thing that leads to feeds from Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Wikipedia, Flickr... all the usual web 2.0 favourites.

I don't get it. For several reasons.

The site sits behind an age verification check, because its content is uncontrollable. Surely most Skittles buyers are young? We'll let that one go though, because any interested ten year old will just lie on the check.

The menu isn't well executed and it gets in the way. It even obscures part of the 'Contact Us' page, which belongs to Skittles. That's just lazy.

The major problem with it seems to be that in a web full of aggregator sites, why would anybody be interested in this Skittles effort? Maybe there's an army of Skittles fans, incapable of using Flickr to satisfy their craving for Skittley pictures, who will form the user base.

There's one very good reason why people will be interested. In the best traditions of the web, the Skittles Twitter feed is now carrying messages like 'Skittles made me piss a rainbow. Is that normal?'. Sorry, but that was one of the cleaner ones. I don't think I want to know what Skittlefisting is.


The site is generating loads of chatter, but it's not exactly positive and I've got serious doubts about whether it will be allowed to stay up for long enough to look for any increase in sales.
Thankfully, the pictures and videos links point to corporate spaces on Flickr and Youtube, otherwise I think we can all imagine what could have been achieved with some creative image tagging.

If skittles.com does stay up, then as soon as the people abusing the Twitter feed get bored and move on, it's going to have no traffic at all.

Here's a little tweet

Twitter suddenly seems to be everywhere in the UK. Stephen Fry is on it and so are lots of other celebrities.

What's going on? Could it be a Tipping Point and that's why Twitter has suddenly taken off here?

I don't think so. News volume in the UK about Twitter jumped at the start of 2008, when Britney Spears (among others) had her account hacked. On this Trends chart, Google have helpfully labelled that point 'E'.



If the picture's a bit small, number of Google searches is the top line and number of news stories is the bottom one.


The next point to the right of my artfully drawn black line is the week that a photo was posted on Twitter of an aeroplane down in the Hudson River.

My theory is that the mainstream UK media has just noticed Twitter on the back of a Heat magazine style Britney Spears story and getting a free front page photo of a sinking aeroplane. There's no such thing as bad publicity, right?

Where it goes from here I'm not sure, but would be willing to bet that Twitter gets taken over in the next year or so and then integrated into a larger product. It's a fun toy, but doesn't have enough of an offering to support itself through ads or - God fobid - charge users for the service. Look for Google trying to give Open Social a kick start.

Congratulations, you're a press photographer

An aeroplane landed in the Hudson river this morning. Or more accurately crashed, seeing as a large flock of birds passing through the engines meant that it didn't have much choice in the matter.

Lots of news outlets are reporting that a twitter photo has been beamed around the world, appearing in newspapers and online and giving the taker his 15 minutes of fame.



What I'm wondering is, how much has he been paid? Newspapers traditionally pay photographers for content and the picture was viewed over 7,000 times before twitter's servers crashed.

In the UK, the Press Complaints Commission is investigating the publication by newspapers of pictures and other material obtained through social networking sites.

Newscorp bought the owner of Myspace.com for $580m with Rupert Muroch saying that the site would drive traffic to Newscorp's Fox TV sites.

Maybe.

What it definitely did is gave Fox TV access to the next David Beckham's drunken teenage party pictures. How much is that worth?