Sugarmelon – There's so much more outside – Dieter Zirnig

I am often starting online-tipp-games under my friends due to several events (f.e. www.sugarmelon.com/euro08/), if there are elections or there are sport-events. Usually I am having special created “HTML-pages” with input-fields, checking, and this whole HTML-Request-Resonse-Registration-Thing. I created Awareness usually with E-Mail, Skype or other messaging-systems. I wanted to find other possibilities.

I created www.sugarmelon.com/twittipp

Avoiding media-breaks and staying in one medium.
I asked myself “Why having a ‘media-break‘?” and “Why jumping from an e-mail or a messaging-tool to a webpage?” I was searching for the shortest way in delivering and getting information within the same “medium”.

The solution was twitter: Request and Response in one medium.
I implemented a small application, based on twitter. I sent out a twitter-message, that user should send their result to “Germany-Spain” and tag it with #euro08, #twittipp or directly to @twittipp. This test was fullfilled within a small target-group in Vienna.

Implementation and some special cases: Avoiding double and impossible votes.
I used PHP, twitter-functions and summize, for filtering the responses. I tried to catch special cases like

• avoiding double-votes,
• impossible votes, which are >10 goals on each side and
• giving an overview about the average results/tipps.
• filtering tipps and automatically recognition of winning-team (f.e. 4-2 for spain will be transformed into GER-ESP 2:4).

One of my targets was also getting in dialog and touch with the user and send him a twitter-message back.

Twitter overtook the registration-process, I had access to username, etc. Twitter also managed datahandling and datamining. Twitter is working as a powerful multi-dimensional entry-field.

Resume: The test worked wonderful.
The test worked perfectly, although, not a lot of people attended this game (10). The filter via summize worked, although there was a breakdown for more than three hours sunday morning.

Twitter-User josue from Spain was amazed, that his tipp was filtered to sugarmelon.com/twittipp by fortune and noticed this on his twitter-feed:

There have been some questions, why I do not have implemented such a thing before and only at the last game. The answer is clear: I was afraid about spending too much time with twittipp during the Euro. I know myself… I would have spent day and night with this application…

Next time again. Thanks for testing and participating!