Vancouver was touted as the "Twitter Olympics" before it had even started. 

Olympians would have almost unlimited access to the internet - compared to the Summer Olympians’ limited experiences in Beijing - and that, combined with the increasing adoption of social networking platforms in the last two years and the advancing level of sophistication of mobile phones made it look as if this could be the first Olympics to be reported on by the Olympians themselves in real time. 

The International Olympic Committee (IOC) issued guidelines for athletes to follow when using social networking to report about their experiences at the Winter Olympics, and while these caused some confusion at first, they did not seem to detrimentally affect the sheer amount of news snippets, trivia, commentary and photos that flowed out of the two Winter Olympics Villages. 

We at insidethegames had been following potential Olympians on Twitter for a number of months in the build-up to Vancouver 2010, watching them relate their experiences as they attempted to qualify for the Games, and we revised our list to cover as many competing Olympians as we could find from all over the World.  

Anyone who subscribed to our truly multi-national Twitter list could see what was being said by almost 300 Olympians as they tweeted in English, French, Italian, Dutch, German, Norwegian, Finnish and many other languages using no more than 140 characters at a time.

It wasn’t just the Olympians that were commenting on the Games of course, the whole world was watching and talking about it, and for the first time you could see what the topics of conversation were and contribute instantly. The tone was set on the eve of the Games by the tragic death of Nodar Kumaritashvili, news of which swept over Twitter before it had been confirmed by any major news channel. 

The speed of Twitter, and the ability to search what is being said, meant that links to the footage of the crash (prior to it being pulled from YouTube and other sites apparently due to IOC rights violations) were everywhere if that was what you wanted to see, although there were also many, many messages from Tweeters warning "don’t watch". 

Twitter also has a trending topics feature, where the top ten words currently being most used in messages (aka tweets) are listed, and whilst many major news broadcasters were still coming to terms with how to handle the story the words "luge", "Georgia/Georgian" and "Nodar Kumaritashvili" were trending worldwide, showing the level of public interest and sadness in the story. 

The immediate nature of the internet meant that insidethegames had real-time feedback from the readers of our website about our level of coverage of the tragedy, from plaudits congratulating us on our depth and speed of reporting, as we amended our story with breaking news as it happened, to concerns from some readers about the photographs chosen to accompany our and other reports of the incident.  This culminated in our publication of a thought provoking article by Steven Downes on the overall news coverage of the accident which again invoked some strong views (click here to read).

Of course, Twitter isn’t the only social network out there. The official Vancouver 2012 website integrated with Facebook to give people the opportunity to interact with other sports fans by commenting on events as they happened. In my personal experience this was a limited success as the conversations I watched seemed to do one of two things. 

Either they quickly descended to a slanging match between at least one American and one Canadian over whose country was better/who would win the most medals/who would win the ice hockey, or else the message stream seemed to be over-run with posters (again mainly from the US) asking where they could watch the coverage live, as NBC appeared to not be showing it. 

Indeed there were many frustrated US residents who had to curtail their social networking activity when they realised that they were in great danger of knowing the results of big races before they could watch them, and West Coast residents in the same time zone as Vancouver found it particularly difficult to understand NBC’s reluctance to show any events live, not even through streaming them on their website. 

It’s no surprise that the phrase #NBCfail was also trending on Twitter regularly during Vancouver 2010. I was just delighted that the Facebook experiment on the official website had an off button - one thing I have learned during these Games is that you can have too much social networking interaction!

For me, experiencing the Olympics through the actual thoughts of Olympians has been the most enlightening and enjoyable part of these "Twitter Olympics". 

They have allowed us to follow their Olympic experiences through their words and photographs, recording their anticipation while travelling to Vancouver, their participation in the opening ceremony (together with many, many photos), the atmosphere in the Villages and the excitement when Arnold Schwarzenegger arrived for breakfast with the US athletes (cue more photos).

We had views of their accommodation, news on how their training was going, their nerves in the build up to their events, their delight at just being involved, their sheer pleasure when a team-mate competed well, their awe at the most memorable performances from disciplines different to their own, and their own feelings after their competitions had finished: how they dealt with what they perceived as success or failure. 

Now the Games are closed we get to share in their return home, and we are seeing the photos of large crowds that have come out to greet medallists in countries as distant as the Netherlands and South Korea. We can share with the Olympians as they plan their next competition or maybe their imminent retirement, and how they deal with what one tweeting athlete referred to today as "Post Olympics Depression".

From fevered discussions about who might light the flame at the Opening Ceremony, through general amazement at snowboard cross and ski cross - both terms trended on Twitter showing just how successfully these new sports engaged the public’s interest - to terms such as "tomahawk" being used in general conversations - these Games have been the most accessible to the viewing public ever. 

The established broadcasting and news media now has two years to understand how best to compete with the real-time, first-person experience that social networks have shown they can give, and how to embrace that competition, so that London 2012 is truly the most inclusive Olympic Games yet.

Louisa Gummer is the social networking manager of insidethegames