Ahead of T20 World Cup, Twitter brings Communities to India and rolls out live cricket scorecards

Twitter has extended its Communities feature to India with the launch of a Cricket-focused community called Cricket Twitter-India that will enable users to talk all things cricket in multiple Indian languages.

The launch comes as the T20 Cricket World Cup officially kicks off later this week. Twitter is also introducing live cricket scorecards that will provide users the latest updates on its platform.

This is Twitter's first non-US community after the social media firm launched the product in September 2021. The feature is on an invite-only mode and available for a select group of participants on iOS and web. It is available as a read-only version for Android users.

Each community will have administrators and moderators who will have unlimited invites, while members will have five invites per community as part of the pilot. The invites are sent via direct messages.

When a user joins a community, they can tweet directly to that group instead of all their followers and only members of that community will be able to reply to that conversation.

That said, Community pages and timelines are publicly visible so anyone can read, quote tweet, and report these tweets.

"We want to continue to support public conversation and help people find Communities that match their interests, while also creating a more intimate space for conversation," the company said in September.

Community creation is limited at the moment but the company said it will allow more people to create communities in the coming months.

"Some of the initial Communities we’re testing surround popular conversations on Twitter. Examples include dogs, weather, sneakers, skincare, and astrology, with many more to come" the company said at the time of launch in September.

On October 20, Twitter also acquired a London-based group chat app Sphere, following which the startup said its team of 20 employees would on the social media firm's Communities, Direct Messages, and Creators initiatives.

Live score

Live cricket scorecards will be available on the Sports tab of Twitter's discovery-focused Explore page. These scores will also continue to appear on event pages during a match, so that users "can follow the conversation and the scores in real time", the company said.

Twitter said that more than 75 million conversations were just about cricket on the platform between July 1, 2020 and July 1, 2021.

"In the coming weeks, we’ll find more ways to make it easier for users to find relevant match content and join conversations with like-minded people," the company said.