Telegraph uses Twitterfall for live football pages

Appropriately enough a Twitter update from @BenLaMothe alerted Journalism.co.uk to an innovative new use of Twitter on Telegraph.co.uk’s sport pages.

After displaying Twitterfall, which can be set up to aggregate tweets containing multiple terms, on its big news screens, a stream of relevant Twitter updates are displayed in a widget on the right-hand side of the site’s live Premiership football match report pages.

Developed by a team of students, using Twitterfall could provide a neat way of following the conversations around certain players, transfer gossip or matches as they’re played.

Ian Douglas, head of digital production at Telegraph.co.uk, explained to Journalism.co.uk that list of club names and key player names are currently being tracked, but if new trends or keywords emerge they can be quickly added.

Certain tweaks to avoid irrelevant updates have been made – #chelsea is being used as opposed to Chelsea to avoid tweets about nights on the Kings Road, for example.

The Telegraph wanted to trial Twitterfall on pages that have ‘a lot of activity and a lot of people talking’, said Douglas, but is being considered for other areas of the site and potentially topic pages. The appropriateness of the widget to a given page, because it updates so rapidly, must be taken into consideration, he added.

The title is happy to look outside of its own development team to third parties when necessary, said Douglas, with other recent collaborations including this interactive guide to new Formula One cars.

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