Peter Kafka

Recent Posts by Peter Kafka

Twitter Kicks Off Its Super Bowl Site, Using Visa's Money

Twitter + big TV events are a natural combination, and one that Twitter has been playing up as it sells itself to advertisers. So this one makes perfect sense: An official site for Super Bowl tweets, underwritten by Visa.

I’ve taken a quick tour and can report that it’s more or less what you would expect: A filtered stream of tweets about next week’s Packers-Steelers game. Quite astutely, the biggest emphasis on the opening page is on tweets from NFL players themselves, who have embraced the platform even as the league has struggled to make sense of it.

And there are also some cool graphics that show off trending Super Bowl topics, sorted by time, geography, etc. I’m a little surprised to see Steelers talk so widespread throughout the country, but I guess that’s just my Midwestern bias poking through. (Seriously. Everyone’s rooting for Aaron Rodgers, right?)

Twitter did something similar last summer for the World Cup, but that effort didn’t seem to have been thought through very well, and very quickly became overwhelmed with spam and random chatter. I have a hunch Twitter has worked some of that out this time.

Also worth noting is that in the past, this kind of site might have had a hard time attracting much attention, but now Twitter’s ad platform can give it a real shot in the arm: A link to the site is today’s “Promoted Trend.”

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I think the NSA has a job to do and we need the NSA. But as (physicist) Robert Oppenheimer said, “When you see something that is technically sweet, you go ahead and do it and argue about what to do about it only after you’ve had your technical success. That is the way it was with the atomic bomb.”

— Phil Zimmerman, PGP inventor and Silent Circle co-founder, in an interview with Om Malik