Silence grips in front of the television set when there is a nail-biting game. Football is not an exception to it. Suddenly the joy or disappointment erupts, if the player hits the goal.

The behaviour, which you witness while watching on television, is also mirrored on Twitter. 

Tweets go up significantly at crucial junctures of the game. But that crucial juncture is preceded by huge drop in tweets also. 

Quoting the June 28 match between Brazil and Chile, Miguel Rios, Data Science Manager in Twitter, explains in the Twitter blog that the last penalty kick, which sent Brazil through to the quarterfinals, generated the highest single-minute activity in the World Cup with 388,985 TPM (tweets per minute).

[Twitter looks at the moments in TPM. Such a TPM contains at least one World Cup-specific keyword.]

To understand the surge in TPM, Twitter looked at TPS (tweets per second). The blog post said that TPS measures system-wide Twitter usage (not tied to specific keyword, as TPM is). “What we found is that just as each player took his shot, Twitter activity dropped markedly,” the blog post said.

This pattern has repeated itself for each of the shootouts in the knockout round, it said.

“On Twitter, you can see the world gradually draw its attention more to the screen as the shot nears. When the referee blows the whistle, Twitter goes nearly silent as all eyes are glued on the crucial kick. The shot is taken, and Twitter -- as with fans worldwide -- erupts into applause, disappointment and elation,” the blog post said.

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