Each Olympics brings one or two novel new events. At the 2010 Olympic Winter Games, which start in Vancouver on Friday, there is Ski Cross, in which four skiers plunge down a mountain at the same time.
Then there is an unofficial competition that we’ll call the Social Media Slalom.
That is the race between the Web’s two pre-eminent social media companies, Facebook and Twitter, to establish themselves as the most visible and viable online option for fans that want to connect directly to athletes and get the latest updates from the competition without the filter of big media.
For this purpose, the micro-blogging site Twitter actually seems like the more useful tool. Fans can connect directly to Tweeting athletes and hear, for example, that the speed skater Apolo Anton Ohno feels a sudden “shift in energy” while working out. Twitter is publishing a list of verified Tweeting athletes, as is NBC. A site called Twitter-Athletes is a useful resource for the Winter Olympics and also organizes lists of athletes in other sports who use the service.
But it is Facebook, the social network, that appears to be the focus of more organized efforts to create an online hub to the Winter Games. The International Olympics Committee has used Facebook to create an Olympic Games Page that now has more than a million followers. The page collects Facebook updates from athletes like the snowboarder Shaun White and the skier Lindsey Vonn and adds in a steady flow of photos.
The International Olympic Committee is also using Facebook to conduct a fan photo contest, awarding free tickets to events to winners, and has created Olympic mini-games on the social network.
Alex Huot, the newly appointed head of social media for the I.O.C., who blogged about his role here, said in an interview that he thought Vancouver was going to be “the first social media Olympics.” The question for the Web’s social media giants: who will get the gold?