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I was out last night, but I've seen this kind of Twitter tv backchannel occur on a few other occasions (The Apprentice, last weekend's screening of Indiana Jones, Doctor Who, etc etc).

It would be an interesting exercise to scan Twitter and try and pick out tweets related to what's currently being broadcast (using a TV schedules feed).

Hello Darren,

I have to say, your 'tweets' last night, were actually far more entertaining than the show!


@jimconnolly

It certainly points the way to some uses for twitter beyond micro-blogging and life-streaming though clearly there were many twitter public timeline followers who were irritated by the dominant Eurovision swarming (I did personally use Summize to filter the Eurovision specific tweets) though currently such spontaneous events are pushing twitter's ability to cope to the limits. Inane or not last night was a good example of the social in social networking.

I was as I always on IRC (that's one of the original Internet chat services without the ads, content filtering, and giant smiley faces) and we were commenting on Eurovision, nothing particularly unusual about it, we often comment on shows, Dr Who, The Apprentice, Primeval, US imports, etc.

We all went in to hysterics over Sweden's scores, only for one of them to ruin it later on by revealing he was a Swedish comic and it was all on purpose!!

Currently just in the U.S. and Canda, but I think you'd find the concept behind areyouwatchingthis.com interesting. It's a Flash Mob creator of sorts when things get exciting in the most DVR-resistant genre: Sport.

Currently just in the U.S. and Canda, but I think you'd find the concept behind interesting. It's a Flash Mob creator of sorts when things get exciting in the most DVR-resistant genre: Sport.

Political blogger Guido Fawkes does a live web chat on his site (order-order.com) during the TV broadcast of PMQs every week. Posters can comment in real time on the "action."

I should also mention the rugby match "spoiler" threads on Gwladrugby.com, which are often more interesting and insightful than the TV commentaries!

Is this any different to online chat - IRC etc? That's had live commentary and discussion on live events (e.g. TV) for decades... IRC may not be 'cool' any more, but it's still widely used, with close to a million users online at any moment...

I wrote on a similar theme last year in a post entitled 'the digital water cooler' -

With a working link this time:

I find the concept of watching TV and operating a computer at the same time an odd one, and surely is not good for your eyes!

On Australian radio there's a popular midnight quiz called The Challenge run by Tony Delroy, which has its own Facebook site with over a thousand members. It's quite common for Facebook members to post comments about the questions and answers as the quiz progresses.

"People were also encourage to "tag" their Eurovision comments using a hashtag, #eurovision, and so posts directly relating to the event could be followed in real time."

Great we could re-discover informed viewing...

...could #Questiontime help us re-discover informed democracy?

I didn't watch Eurovision, I was playing Team Fortress 2 at the time, but I did know what was going on as several of the other players were watching and were using the voice chat.