Unlike many Twitter trackers, this one doesn’t just stream the tweets in a big, unwieldy flow. It’s not just one window that aggregates everything tagged “Olympics.” Instead, the interface to the application uses images to display the various topics being tweeted about and sizes them proportionally to the number of tweets. Obviously, the sports and other keywords associated with the events occurring now will have larger sections and those past will be smaller. In addition, within each section, other popular keywords appear for even more granular filtering of the Twitter stream. So if you’re interested in snowboarding tweets but only those about “Shaun White,” for example, that’s an option.

When you click into any of these sections, the Twitter stream appears on the left with related keywords on the right. So if you click “Evan Lysacek” you’ll see keywords like “gold,” “men,” “skating,” “wins,” etc. (Yep, as you may have guessed, he won a gold medal.) The Tracker even has a bar at the top that counts down until its next automatic refresh – every minute. That’s better than a live stream since it gives you a chance to actually read what’s in front of you, but it’s still fast enough to keep you up-to-date in near real-time.

Also at the top is a link to “Olympic Tweets” for even more types of tweets. These are sorted by different categories like tweets from the athletes, tweets from the NBCOlympics.com Twitter account, tweets from the Olympics Health Twitter account, and “All.”

The entire Twitter app is part of the larger “Olympic Pulse” – the app that tracks the blogs, tweets, and other news from the Olympics. You can check out the entire Olympic Pulse here.

The data is from the Silverlight 2 Customer Evidence and Quote Sheet.

During the 17 days of the games, the site had

• 51.9 million unique visitors (106% more than Athens and Torino combined)
• 1.3 billion page views
• 75.5 million video streams initiated (601% more than Athens and Torino combined)
• 9.9 million hours of video watched (equivalent of 1,126 years of video).
• More than 27 minutes per user average viewing time (compared to 3 minutes for sites using other streaming video technologies)

And these great quotes from Perkins Miller, Senior Vice President, Digital Media, NBC Sports and Olympics:

“NBC had plans to create the most ambitious online video event in history — more than 2,200 hours of Olympic coverage in 25 sports in less than 17 days – with 3,500 hours on demand. NBC needed to ensure the experience was versatile, stable, and — above all — engaging and entertaining.”

NBC Sports chose Silverlight 2 because “with such a vast number of events and hours of live and on-demand video, we needed a scalable, flexible platform that would deliver an immersive and engaging experience.”

Beyond the NBC in the USA, Silverlight was used for Olympics coverage in other countries, including:

• France (FranceTV)
• Netherlands (NOS)
• Russia (Sportbox.ru)
• Italy (RAI)

Silverlight was a great coming-of-age story for Silverlight as we prepared to launch Silverlight 2. The“does Silverlight scale” and “will customers install it” questions have largely gone away in the last couple of months.