Naresh Gupta
Blog

London Olympics or Social Media Games

Last night Twitter suffered a global outage. The Microblogging site for down for many hours and users across the globe could not access the site. While Twitter officially did not attribute the outage to Olympic Tweets, the tech bloggers refused to discount the possibility. Today Facebook seem to be suffering the same fate. Again is London Olympic a part of the reason?

The Olympics Games Organizing Committee emblazoned the giant screens inside the stadium with hashtag 'savethesurprise' during the games rehearsals. Yet the details leaked out forcing the organizers to even delete the videos from You Tube. The social media is putting tremendous pressure on the organizing committee to keep things under wraps.

This is a prequel to what I think is about to happen. London Olympics will be the catalyst for the social media's growth and adoption world over. The adoption of social media will put pressure on traditional news media even more, even altering the entire business dynamics.

Till now the audience globally has had to depend on news media for 'breaking news' for 'inside information' and have driven it by 'our channel exclusive'. All this might take a back seat this olympics

The first thing we will remember the games for is Twitter. The games can truly revolutionize Twitter and pose a real serious challenge to more established Face book. Suppose the players Tweet their opinions; the coaches Tweet their reactions; and the spectators too Tweet their experience. We as spectators can know how the player thought, planned, performed and felt all in first person, and that is just one of the many new ways of connection. The news channels will then have to find alternate means of connection. The fans will be able to follow their stars without boundaries any time, all the time. Twitter can go really main stream in India if that happens.

The videos of Opening Ceremony rehearsals found its way to You Tube. The videos of official ceremony are bound to find their way to You Tube. This means as an ordinary viewer you can watch the opening ceremony with hundreds of different viewpoints. The Games will push the entire user generated content phenomenon to a new level. The real story of games will not lie with what is being telecast on TV, but in what the players, coaches and spectators are saying. The 'insiders' point of view will always carry more weight than the telecast version of the games. The viewers will be spoilt for choice as they would get to see very vantage point that is there to see or experience.

All this will be fuelled by the new age high quality video enabled cell phones. A slew of mobile apps dedicated to Olympics are already available on Google Play and App Store. These games will be the games of mobile phones, apps on phones, streaming videos on phones, videos shot on phones and a virtual medial networks created by phones. The true massification of apps can be fuelled by the Olympics games.

Faster, higher, stronger, this time around also applies to all the viewers, followers and those who like.

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