As some – or a lot – of you may know, I'm quite the Barça fanatic. Barça being FC Barcelona which one of the best (if not the best) football clubs, ever. Yes, I wrote 'ever'.
Since I'm following FC Barcelona through everything, I also need to follow the club in the news. To stay updated. Read reactions from the players. What did Guardiola (the coach) say after the game? Etc.
Usually this is done by traditional means. You either read a sports magazine, newspaper, website, newsletter – whatever. And you read what they write about your club. Maybe you even search the website for news about, in this case, FC Barcelona.
That changed for me some time ago, because I came across a channel, that utilizes what Twitter (the micro-status-update-service) really is all about. I can't really remember when I started to follow @barcastuff on Twitter, but it was certainly while the number of followers what three-digit (it's 44,526 as I'm writing this).
But it seems that the (quite comfortable) victory over Manchester United in Saturday's UEFA Champions League final is a good opportunity to express my gratitude.
Since I started following, @barcastuff has brought me close to non-stop news and updates about FC Barcelona. They are (among) the first with the line-ups. They search the news and tweet the headlines, so that I can go to, for instance, sport.es and Google-translate the article and read about Messi or the latest transfer rumours. This means what the news about FC Barcelona travel a lot quicker, I don't have to wait for Danish or English media to catch up on the story. And of course @barcastuff live-updates while the game is on. They even have post-match reactions, although I'm not quite sure how they do that.
As a matter of fact, I'm not sure, if @barcastuff is a 'he', a 'she' or 'they'. And I really don't care. As with The Economist, it's all about the message – not the sender. In fact I found The Economist's article about FC Barcelona via a @barcastuff tweet.
What @barcastuff does, is what the media landscape needs right now more than anything else. People who are searching and combing through the enormous amount of information and news out there and are selecting the best of it (or in this case the most, if not all, of it) to present it to us, the end users, in a clean and nice way. We may then choose to dig deeper, if we want the entire story.
For the media bosses and concerned media employees out there one question has to be asked: 'Whould you pay for it?' Yes, I would. But only because it's so damn good and about Barça. And if the service did cost money, the number of followers might still be in three digits.
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