#Eurovision songs sound better on Twitter.....

A few days ago I noted an interesting thing - Twitter used as a realtime chatstream for a broadcast TV show (See here about Question Time) in the UK. Essentially it worked very much like a conference Twitterstream (more like watching a conference on Web TV in fact) where everyone comments and labels the show with one particular name - eg #bbcqt in the above case (#xxxx is a "hashtag" in Twitterspeak).

In the "Broadcast TV" case, the show is broadcast over TV, the Twitter audience tunes in to watch TV, there is an early "battle of the hashtags" until one is agreed as the "right" one, and the comments start to fly.

For our non-European readers, the Eurovision song contest is a hardy annual and is the epitome of cheesy - naff people, naff songs, naff everything - I hardly ever watch it.

Tonight however was different, the Twitterstream (see #Eurovision here) started to come to life with very funny comments, and so i watched the show on TV for the first time in aaaages. The commenting and conversation made it worthwhile. As one person remarked, its:

...Like having ur mates round without having to provide refreshments.

Interesting trend....one would need to simplify the whole hashtagging process to make it simpler, but the user interaction is very good. In fact, one could:

...have Internet overlay on tv. I want relevant tweets from friends scrolling across the bottom of my progs!!

The songs were even half (I said half) bearable with all the comments flying around, and the winner (Norway, watch video above) was cheesy and naff, as tradition demands.

I've started a poll on Twitter to take the basic data on how we use it, twt me (@freecloud) with the answers to:

During #Eurovision Were you

(i) using laptop/mobile,
(ii)watching TV/WebTV,
(iii) in living room/bed/other ?

I'll collate and post them up here and on Twitter - answers could be quite interesting.