Welcome to the new micro-channels.

Not everyone, it has to be said, is interested in cricket. Especially Afghan cricket. It didn't really exist, I'm told, until refugees who grew up in Pakistan returned home with a bat, bails and ball in their bag.

Now there's a national team that has steadily risen from Division Five - the minnows of the cricketing world, including the US, Germany and Vanuatu - to World Cup qualifier in less than a year.

It's not exactly become the national sport, but cricket, and the national team, have caught the imagination of Afghans, particularly among the diaspora - one of the world's largest (one in four refugees is an Afghan).

Every country the national team visited, they would be greeted by a trickle of Afghans.

The fairy tale sputtered to a halt there, as Afghanistan missed out on a position in the World Cup. Their consolation prize: one-day international status for the next few years.

Which is why they found themselves this month in Mutare, Zimbabwe, playing the country's second XI.

Usually websites like Cricket Europe or the governing body, the International Cricket Council, provide live play-by-play scoring.

But in Zimbabwe the ICC had no Internet connection to send someone there, and so there was no easy way of finding out what was going on.

Which is where my colleague, Leslie Knott, comes in.

She has been producing a documentary on the team, and, despite being a Canadian, has developed an unhealthy passion for cricket. And the team she has been following around the world the past few months.

None of the players had cell phones, however, and the Internet connection was spotty.

On one Zimbabwean chat forum she found some chat about the match and posted a message, asking whether they could find a groundskeeper with a cell phone. Other Afghans were also grumbling about not being able to find out what was going on.

Eventually Leslie discovered one of the players found a phone and so she called him and got the score.

To share her information she created a Twitter profile in the name of one of the members of the team - Raees Ahmadzai, a good friend whom she had helped set up an NGO.

She started posting updates when she could get them.

A total newcomer to Twitter, she was surprised by the response.

"Yesterday I didn't have a Twitter account," she says. "Today 30 people are following me."

Among them: a young Afghan kid from Orange County, California; a science fiction writer from New Zealand; a web master from Northern Ireland.

One blogger took her tweets and added them to his blog. Others have been forwarding her tweets.

Through Twitter she hooked up with the BBC Pashto language service's Emal Pasarly - who was also phoning the team, and passed on the scores by text message.

Leslie translated them into English and put them on her Twitter feed.

A community was born. Overnight.

What's interesting about this is that it's been done by people who not natural twitterers, and who weren't users of the service before.

I take it as a good example of how, using a tool like Twitter, a community of shared interests - however narrow - can coalesce.

We should be grateful to Twitter for this - or more accurately, to the past few years which has seen a rapid evolution of online tools that hasn't just focused on glitz and multimedia, but on the ease and speed with which connections can be made.

The result is something like Twitter, which its users have adopted and modified to suit their purposes.

People like Leslie can get information, publish it quickly, and make it easy for others to find that information and subscribe to updates.

Of course the technology behind this isn't rocket science. But in some ways the thinking is.

Instead of thinking of publishing as a big scale, quality enterprise, tools like Twitter have focused on speed, ease of adoption and ease of discovery.

In other words, making it easy for folk like us to share what we know with others.

Other tools will come along and replace Twitter, or supplant it.

That's good; it means we're getting better at all this.

For now, I just like the idea that a bunch of Afghan cricketers in Africa can be followed by their fans using a simple feed put together by followers thousands of miles apart who just want to share their enthusiasm.

(c) 2009 Loose Wire Pte Ltd

This story cannot be reproduced without written permission from the writer. Jeremy Wagstaff is a commentator on technology and appears regularly on the BBC World Service. He can be found online at jeremywagstaff.com or via email at jeremy@loose-wire.com

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