Serge Jespers

You’re probably not going to believe me when I tell you that this post has been sitting in my draft folder for a while. Especially so now that Mashable actually beat me to it. But it’s true… Honestly ;-) Anyway… It doesn’t really matter since this is just cool stuff that needs to be shown.

If you didn’t know that the World Cup is currently happening in South Africa you’ve probably been living on Mars for the last few weeks. It is one of the biggest sports events in the world and lots of people watch/follow it online.

As Belgium (my home country) is not competing in this year’s competition I didn’t really pay too much attention to the World Cup until someone sent me a link to this amazing World Cup calendar on Twitter. It allows you to look up matches by dates, location, teams and groups.

This is probably the first year that so many people are also tweeting about the World Cup. UK newspaper The Guardian created a stunning visualization for World Cup related tweets. You select a match you want to see the tweets for and the app will play back the entire match. It’s difficult to explain… You just have to see it for yourself.

It’s probably not easy to be in the oil business these days let alone link it with the World Cup but I think Castrol pulled it off. This app is sort of like a dashboard application. It shows you a bunch of stats about this year’s World Cup. For instance, it shows you how many times a whistle has been blown, how many yellow and red cards have been issued, and much more. It also has stadium webcams, the latest news and live tweets.

CNN is also using Twitter data for their World Cup visualization app. It shows you which player, teams or topics people are tweeting about the most. You can replay the past 24 hours or watch a live feed.

On their special World Cup blog the New York Times has an application that completely analyzes the match you select. It shows you the lineups, passes between players, a heat map and an overview of who had ball possession and more. It seems like a small app but there is a lot of data in it.

Last but certainly not least I want to highlight the FIFA website. FIFA not only uses Flash to stream the World Cup highlights, they also built their “Match Cast” application with Flash. Like the NYT app it also visualizes all the stats from a particular match.

I’m sure there are many more Flash based apps out there. If you’ve found one that’s not on the list, feel free to leave a comment. Oh… And ehr… Flash on!