World Cup: It’s Gonna Gitcha!

World Cup Fever–Catch It!

World Cup Fever has gripped Teh Twitterz, and it’s an epidemic. While some are delirious with excitement over the countries they love, hate, or love to hate, others are suffering the malaise of being bombarded with information they just couldn’t care less about. Even more than usual.

And while some client applications give users the ability to “mute” or filter out tweets containing certain hashtags, there are almost as many hashtags for the tournament as there are fans. Not only that, but many times people get so excited, they forget to use any tags at all! In short, if one wanted to bury his head in the sand (yes, I still use the ancient convention of male pronouns for unknown-sex individuals) and not see any tweets related to the FIFA World Cup, he would need to avoid Twitter entirely until it’s over.

The disdain some have for the game has led to some amusing tweets, though. For instance:

Today in the world's most popular sport, Iran and Nigeria played to a 0-0 tie. People ACTUALLY take off work for this snooze fest of a game.
— Dan Joseph (@DanJoseph78) June 16, 2014

Or this:

This —> @irishspy: @wayward_okie It would be much more exciting if random balls contained plastic explosives.
— ●|||||||● SUSAN (@wayward_okie) June 18, 2014

Your humble blogger is content to watch the happenings of the tournament via Twitter, and listen to the guys a couple cubes over as they talk about their streams and why one is nearly a full minute behind the other. What’s up with that, ESPN?

Go Team USA! (I guess. sigh)

President of Estonia Slams Paul Krugman

Other bloggers have written about this, but they seemed to pick and choose the tweets they wanted to show. I created a Storify story including all the relevant tweets, excluding only the short replies to specific Twitter users.

Here (was) the Deal

If you got here by clicking "The Corner Office" at the bottom of one of my tweets, thank you! In order to get the free software to brand your own tweets, please visit my friend Kay Ballard's blog, New Media Martini.

Be aware that this software runs on Adobe AIR. I understand there is an AIR environment available for Windows, Mac, and Linux, so you should be covered. 

While the software itself is free of monetary charge, you will be asked for your email address twice: first by New Media International (they won't bug you much--just let you know when new products or websites are launching); then by the publisher of the software. I think it's worth it.

UPDATE 2010/06/23: I've been told the publisher of the free TweetBrand software has stopped supporting it. If you follow the steps, you may or may not be able to download and install it, but there will be no upgrades.