Well, it's all over: Spain defeated Italy 4-0 on Sunday in the final match of the UEFA Euro 2012 soccer championships. For supporters, the Euro was an opportunity to get out there and show love for their country - and this visualization, created by Twitter, traces that support in terms of tweets.
The graphic charts the volume of tweets from supporters of each team as the contest unfolded. On June 8, as the first games got underway, fans all over the world were tweeting about their teams. As of the final match on Sunday, the vast majority of the tweets came, naturally enough, from supporters of Spain and Italy. According to the big chart, Spain won out there too, but just barely: they got 2.7 million tweets to Italy's 2.6 million. That's a lot of 140-character cheering. In fact, Twitter says users fired off more than 15,000 tweets per second when Spain scored its fourth goal, setting a sports-related record on the site.
Social media and its relationship to television programming is a big deal right now. One organization that's made a science out of observing social media is Bluefin Labs at MIT. The company offers a detailed look at what people are saying about television shows on social media. Co-founder Deb Roy told the Globe and Mail that social media is "this enormous focus group in the wild ... you've got people who are just naturally expressing their opinions".
Click the image below to see the full interactive site, which includes breakdowns for each individual match in the tournament:
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