Twitterfall was a UK-based website designed to allow users of the

social networking A social network is a social structure made up of a set of social actors (such as individuals or organizations), sets of dyadic ties, and other social interactions between actors. The social network perspective provides a set of methods for a ...

site

Twitter Twitter is an online social media and social networking service owned and operated by American company Twitter, Inc., on which users post and interact with 280-character-long messages known as "tweets". Registered users can post, like, and ...

to view upcoming trends and patterns posted by users in the form of tweets. The project was founded by David Somers and Tom Brearley, computer science students at the

University of York , mottoeng = On the threshold of wisdom , established = , type = Public research university , endowment = £8.0 million , budget = £403.6 million , chancellor = Heather Melville , vice_chancellor = Charlie Jeffery , students ...

. In February 2009, it was revealed that the site was projected onto a wall at ''

The Daily Telegraph ''The Daily Telegraph'', known online and elsewhere as ''The Telegraph'', is a national British daily broadsheet newspaper published in London by Telegraph Media Group and distributed across the United Kingdom and internationally. It was f ...

'' to allow journalists there to view breaking news posted by users to Twitter. Twitterfall gained momentum in March after The Telegraph reported on the creation of the tool. However, the paper was criticised for including an unmoderated Twitterfall stream of budget news (using

hashtags A hashtag is a metadata tag that is prefaced by the hash (also known as pound or octothorpe) sign, ''#''. On social media, hashtags are used on microblogging and photo-sharing services such as Twitter or Instagram as a form of user-generated ...

) on its site, which was subsequently abused by Twitter users. Twitterfall took advantage of Twitter's search trends (listed on the Twitter search page), which revealed topics that were most popular and discussed at that time. Twitter has become more and more important in news coverage, such as the

US Airways US Airways (formerly USAir) was a major United States airline that operated from 1937 until its merger with American Airlines in 2015. It was originally founded in Pittsburgh as a mail delivery airline called All American Aviation, which soon ...

plane crash-landing in the Hudson and the

Mumbai terror attacks The 2008 Mumbai attacks (also referred to as 26/11, pronounced "twenty six eleven") were a series of Terrorism, terrorist attacks that took place in November 2008, when 10 members of Lashkar-e-Taiba, an Islamist terrorist organisation from P ...

in 2008. In May 2009, ITV announced that they were taking advantage of Twitterfall on their site during the

FA Cup Final The FA Cup Final, commonly referred to in England as just the Cup Final, is the last match in the Football Association Challenge Cup. It has regularly been one of the most attended domestic football events in the world, with an official atten ...

. During the Iran election protests of 2009, Twitterfall was used to follow the events as they unfolded.Iran elections and an argument for making Twitter sustainable | No free lunch
/ref> Twitterfall discontinued service January 29th, 2023

References

{{Reflist

External links

Twitterfall
Twitter services and applications