Many non-Americans are perplexed at the popularity of American football with its start-and-stop action. They don’t seem to get that start-and-stop is the point. Over the years, American football has evolved into the perfect sport for TV, many argue, with lots of action breaks for in-depth analysis, on-screen graphics and, of course, commercials. Now it’s proving itself to be the perfect sport for surfing the internet.

According to Nielsen, 14% of this year’s wired Super Bowl viewers spent time simultaneously surfing the net during the game, a 2% increase from last year. Most of those visited Google, Facebook and Yahoo, it detailed. Curiously, one notable absentee on the Nielsen report was Twitter.

It seems social networks, particularly Twitter, is particularly suited to televised sport. The pauses in action at this year’s Super Bowl once again invited tweeting during the game, Twitter itself reports on its blog. Funny then that the NFL maintains its quaint restrictions on any and all play-by-play commentary.

The Olympics now taking place and the upcoming World Cup this summer – which promises to be the first “Twitter World Cup” – will no doubt see similar multi-task viewing.

Sports leagues are constantly adapting to how fans watch the games. So too are producers of the highly viewed talent shows like “American Idol” in the U.S. and “Britain’s Got Talent”, (though the idea of shifting from the cash cow that is SMS voting to Twitter is probably unwise). Could other network programmers, and advertisers even, too, be far behind?