A game-with-a-purpose based on Twitter

I am happy to announce that my research group at TU Graz has launched Bulltweetbingo!, a game-with-a-purpose based on Twitter, today. The game is already live and available at http://bingo.tugraz.at. For an introduction to the idea of Buzzword Bingo, please see the following IBM commercial (Youtube video).

 

IBM Innovation Buzzword Bingo (Youtube)

 

Rather than playing buzzword bingo while listening to a talk, the idea of Bulltweetbingo! is to play Buzzword Bingo with the people you follow on Twitter. All people you follow on Twitter automatically participate in the game by tweeting. A Bulltweetbingo game terminates (i.e. hits “Bingo!”) if the people you follow on Twitter use a particular combination of the defined buzzwords in their tweets. We intend to use the data provided by each game in our research on analzying the semantics of short messages on systems such as Twitter or Facebook. Each game provides information about the relevance and topics of tweets for a particular person as well as some information on the topics of tweets that a person expects to receive in the future.

I’m copy’n pasting some more information about the game that we have made available on the game website  (about the project).

Bulltweetbingo!
Playing a game of bingo with people you follow on Twitter.

A team of researchers from Graz University of Technology, Austria has developed one of the first games-with-a-purpose that is exclusively based on Twitter.

The goal of this project is to annotate and to better understand the short messages posted to so-called social awareness streams such as Twitter or Facebook. Using this data, the researchers aim to improve the ability of computers to effectively organize and make sense out of the sea of short messages available today.

Dr. Markus Strohmaier, Assistant Professor at the Knowledge Management Institute at Graz University of Technology, Austria explains: “While social awareness streams such as Twitter or Facebook have experienced significant popularity over the last few years, we know little about how to best understand, search and organize the information that is contained in them.”

To tackle this problem, the researchers have developed a game of Buzzword Bingo that users can play with people they follow on Twitter.

“With each game users play on our website, we will collect data that helps us develop more effective algorithms for better understanding this new kind of data” Dr. Markus Strohmaier says, “and in addition to that, we simply hope users would enjoy playing a game of Bingo on Twitter. Each game is unique and exciting in a sense that users generally don’t know what tweets people will publish during the course of a bingo game”.

The researchers have launched the site bulltweetbingo! and ask users to sign up and to play a game of Bingo with the people they follow on Twitter. Twitter users can sign up at http://bingo.tugraz.at.

The game was implemented by one of my talented students, Simon Walk – Make sure to hire him if you need a complex web project to be realized quickly and effectively!