Sprinkling more spice to its FIFA #WorldCup tweets and #Brazil2014 hashtags, Twitter announced Tuesday that its colorful hashflags are back in the game as well.
Hashflags are simply hashtags with flag emoticons of the countries participating in the much-awaited World Cup. It was introduced four scores ago and was a big hit among users on Twitter.
“Hashflags are back, along with other features to help you keep up with the #WorldCup,” Twitter’s engineering manager Xiaolei Li writes in a blog post.
The hashflags provide the public with quick, real-time updates of the 64 matches on the world event in Brazil. Twitter says over 300 players from 32 competing countries are Twitter users, providing huge presence on its platform.
“Use a hashtag in front of the relevant three-letter country code, and that country’s flag will appear after the text,” Li says.
For example, a #BRA hashtag would show up the Brazilian flag.
To view the World Cup timeline, just search for #WorldCup or #WorldCup2014 and tap on these hashtags. All tweets related to the event, from Twitter friends to players, coaches, teams, fans, press in and out of Brazil, will appear on the designated timeline. The user can view tweets of just about anything, whether it’s on score updates or match highlights, fans or press comments, and so forth.
For those who aren’t on Twitter but are interested on signing up just for the FIFA World Cup, they will be asked during registration of their new account if they are interested in the game’s matches and will be prompted to select the team they support. New users will also be encouraged to follow relevant accounts related to their selected team.
In an earlier blog post, Twitter suggests that the best place to begin one’s journey to the World Cup is to follow @Socceroos account that offers amazing and exclusive access to all players and coaches in the game as well as photos, videos and breaking sports news from within the Aussies camp in Brazil.
Among the first to tweet of the hashflags is celebrity artist Shakira, who was twice the voice of the official songs for the World Cup events in 2006 and 2010.
Here’s a bummer: Hashflags are temporary unavailable on the Twitter app for iPhone, until Twitter has fixed the bug.
Facebook, however, isn’t going to let Twitter get all the fame from the game because it has also started a page for the World Cup in Brazil. Yet observers say it doesn’t have the real-time pace of Twitter.
