40withegg

or: how Twitter-TV will destroy your timeline

I just watched the Mavericks Surf contest live on ustream.tv. Actually, I didn't just watch: I also chatted, tweeted, bantered, and otherwise interacted with up to 56,000+ others from around the world watching the contest. Without a doubt this was one of most engaging and intriguing merging of social media with a live event which I have ever participated. It was also a very flawed implementation and should be learned from and avoided in this particular form.

A bit about Ustream

Ustream has video. No biggie. The potentially killer app is Social Stream, where users of Twitter, Facebook, AIM, and Myspace can log in using the appropriate account and participate in a live chat-room-like-thing while watching live streaming video of sporting events, conferences, the weather… you name it. Wait, it gets better(?): your chat posts not only update the Social Stream, but also your social network stream: it's a tweet, too!

Tease It Up High And Let It Fly

I watched nearly the entire Mavericks competition, but only peripherally. I was at least as engaged in the Social Stream. People were were ecstatic whenever a rider killed a wave; they went crazy whenever a rider was nearly killed by a wave; and they were brutal to the surfer-dude announcers (and to each other). I laughed out loud on many occasions. Also, reading the stream also helped me learn more about the sport and the famous competitors.

Nasty Wipeout

Chat rooms are not timelines… at least not when they cannot be segregated from your public timeline or reassembled back into chat rooms. I was blown away watching users of at least 4 different social networks participate in the live chat stream; it felt very natural to add replies and reactions, and to lob insults and burns. What fun!

There are two compounding problems, though. First, each individual's postings have no persistent tie to the Social Stream. For example, neither Twitter nor Facebook's applications are programed to facilitate a third party's inter-social-network chat framework. This is a more than just a gnarly washout: encouraging the chat-like interactions might might actually damage the participant's credibility back at home. Each comment into the stream is simply a tweet, wall post, status update, etc. That lively banter in the Social Stream turns into a very weird and spammy public timeline. It's reminiscent of listening to one side of a phone conversation, or more like only being able to listen to one person as they meander through a crowded party.

Drop In On A Bomb And Ride It All The Way To The Beach

I love the idea of reducing the barrier to interaction by embracing as many social networks as possible, and also of persisting the conversations. What's needed is some kind of bucketing system to natively support interactions with live events and their participants. I definitely held back many comments during the Mavericks event because I didn't want to pollute my timeline with unintelligible crap. I would have participated in more free-wheeling manner if I knew that my comments were recored, but safely hidden, from my timeline.

Or, all of the companies could agree on a cross-platform conversation model. Okay…

What about getting the hosts or announcers involved? I'm not sure. There was a certain yelling-at-the-TV factor as the crowd harped on the announcers. At one point the announcers themselves noted that people were probably giving them a hard time. We were. It would have been different if they had been able to say "Hey, @joem, STFU!"