Tweeting Television

I was going to do a post on tweeting TV a while back, after reading Krishnan Guru-Murthy's blog post on the subject. Now the BBC are on the bandwagon too, I thought I'd put in my thoughts on the matter.

For those who've not experienced a TV show 'augmented' with Twitter, then please do. Even if you don't use Twitter, you can use services like monitter.com to view live feeds of tweets containing a particular term. On twitter we have 'hashtags' to denote subjects, and many TV shows actually display their officially recognised hashtag on the screen at the beginning. For example, Watchdog is #bbcwatchdog and Have I Got News for You is #hignfy. The Apprentice (#bbcapprentice) is particularly entertaining if you are watching the show while at the same time sat on Twitter; some of the comments from various people better than the show itself, and of course Twitter users can get away with saying far more offensive things than can be broadcast on prime time BBC1. I actually had the idea a while back to write a VLC plugin or something that cottons on to what you're watching, determines the appropriate hashtag and displays tweets on-screen alongside the TV show, but that's a "to do" for me and I'm sure someone else will do it quicker and better than I can, if they haven't already done so.

So in all, I think tweeting TV shows is great. But there is a problem - not everyone gives a shit. I follow over 100 people on Twitter, all of whom are interesting and/or funny. But some of them occasionally post streams of drivel about a TV show I'm not watching or in which I have no interest. A top example is the X-Factor (#xfactor). My views on a rigged karaoke contest run for Simon Cowell's personal benefit aside, some TV shows just aren't interesting to everyone. Heck, I'm sure every time I tweet something about Doctor Who I get people thinking of unfollowing me. You can block users, why not hashtags? Twitter could even sell statistics to the TV companies for market research purposes, how cool would that be? You could tell how popular a show is by comparing hashtag uses with hashtag blocks. And at the same time, even the most considerate Twitter user would be more eager to tweet about what they're watching knowing that their followers have the ability to block the hashtag if they don't care about it.

So there we go - my to do list. Implement Twitter client with 'hashtag block' function, and implement some kind of hashtag detector using the BBC's linked data. I may be some time.