1. The Challenge
World Cup fever is spreading. Predicting the outcome of the games is half the fun. Every sports fan wants to compete with his peers and prove that he has a better insight into the games and teams. Instead of doing this with just friends or colleagues, we wanted to create a platform where one could play the prediction game with the rest of the world. To do this, we started by looking at Twitter. This real-time medium is already being heavily used as a discussion outlet during football games. It took only a small step to build a World Cup prediction platform on top of twitter.
2. THe Solution
Cuptweets.com collects tweeted World Cup predictions and ranks participants based upon the accuracy of their predictions. How it works? Simple. A twitter user just needs to include two hashtags in his tweet: the hashtag #cuptweets and a hashtag featuring his prediction: e.g. #ENG_USA 2-1 (=England will win by 2-1 against the United States). These “cuptweets” are captured by cuptweets.com.
Based on all of the predictions coming from the twitter community, we feature the “most tweeted score” and the “most likely winner”. Which turns out to be a good way of predicting the correct outcome.
Cuptweets.com was launched in partnership with Sporza, Belgium’s largest sports medium. The branded widget on their homepage uses the cuptweets.com prediction data.
3. The Results
Cuptweets.com launched 3 days before the start of the World Cup. Thanks to the simplicity of our tool (built on top of twitter, no need to register or log in) and the partnership with Sporza, we had great response. One week after the launch of cuptweets.com we have had close to 10,000 site visits and more than 8000 cuptweets. It’s exciting to see who’s going to top the ranking after the final on July, 11. You can still participate on www.cuptweets.com.