Landon Donovan's spectacular World Cup goal for the United States national team this week sparked a virtual growl on Twitter and Facebook that may have been loud enough to sink a stadium full of vuvuzelas.

This is the first World Cup tournament in which social networks have been popular enough to bring in something new the way fans experience the world's largest sporting event, even in the United States, where soccer is still a second-tier sport.

Traffic on Facebook and Twitter has been deep as fans discuss, celebrate and sympathize with each other, as they may, if they were all at the game seeing it being in person. Twitter on Friday, reported one more all-time record for tweets for each second, 3,283, as Japan was victorious over Denmark, with 3-1 the day before.

In a way, social media has amplified the seating capacities of each stadium in World Cup host, South Africa.

Pete Blackshaw, an Executive with the Nielsen Co., the television and Internet monitoring Company said that social media has definitely become substitute for experiencing, as if you are sitting in a stadium to watch that game.

During the World Cup in the year 2006, San Francisco's Twitter Inc. was just getting off the ground and Palo Alto's Facebook Inc. had less than 12 million members.