Sports Scores Broadcasted Through Twitter to Cardinal Fans

Wesleyan sports fans can view play-by-play action of their favorite events through Wesscores, a new service hosted on Twitter.

Twitter is a popular social networking and “microblogging” service used to communicate timely information as well as exchange quick, frequent messages with others. The short Twitter messages, referred to as the “tweets,” can be viewed on a web browser or cell phone as text messages.

The Athletics Department at Wesleyan has created a Twitter account called wescores to send updated sports information and is inviting all the Cardinals fans to follow this account on twitter by visiting the URL http://twitter.com/wescores and clicking on the follow button.

“This is a great way to quickly circulate sports scores to sports fans who cannot be at the game live, or are not near a computer,” says Brian Katten, Wesleyan’s sports information director.

The service debuted for the men’s lacrosse game on March 18 when the Cardinals played SUNY-Farmingdale. Although the game was away, Katten was able to get scores from the Farmingdale’s sports information director through the phone, and relay the scores through the Twitter service.

Ganesan “Ravi” Ravshanker, associate vice president for Information Technology Services, says several members of the U.S. Congress helped popularize the Twitter service recently, and almost every cable news outlet has Twitter accounts that are used for instantaneous two way participation.

ITS also has a Twitter account called “wes_itsinfo,” used to communicate system messages and availability of seats in the public computer labs.

“Twitter is the newest method of communication that seems to be everywhere,” he says. “At Wesleyan, we are exploring different ways in which this tool can be used to communicate with the community, and Wescores seemed to be a perfect application for it.”

Katten and his student assistant, Ben Cohen ’10, will use a cell phone to relay the sports information to Wesscore subscribers.

“If you’re interested in getting information on Wesleyan sports scores, why wouldn’t you want to use this,” Katten says.