Entertainment For Lively Minds
Twitter & The Bad Movie Club
If anyone needs a perfect example of the speed with which the Twitter phenomenon is growing, and the bizarre ways in which the simplicity of the service allows spin-offs to develop, take a look at The Bad Movie Club.
Dreamt up by Father Ted writer Graham Linehan just two short weeks ago, the idea is simple: a movie is selected, and everyone who wants to get involved buys, rents, or downloads a copy. A start time is selected, everyone cues up their copy to the same point at beginning of the film, presses play at the right moment, then 'tweets' their reaction to the drama as it unfolds.
Last night the first of these viewings took place. In two hours 40 minutes, 40,000 related tweets were tracked by nearly 2,000 people, giving the club a grand total total of close to 80,000,000 individual tweets transmitted.
Meanwhile, here's another 100 sites using Twitter to provide something that Twitter itself doesn't provide.
Quite obviously, the service is doomed.
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Amazing.
Completely pointless waste of everyone's time. As if people didn't need any more encouragement to go to the movies and ruin the enjopyment of the sane people there by sitting there with their mobile tweeting all night. What's wrong with actually enjoying the experience? How can you watch a film properly and read 40,000 tweets at the same time?
40,000
It doesn't work like that. The only tweets you receive are from people you've actively chosen to 'follow'. In my case, this amounted to seven messages, and it made ninety minutes in front of the TV more diverting than it otherwise might have been. No harm done, no-one's enjoyment spoiled, no big deal. But it's still quite a phenomenon.
*facepalm*
doh! no one was at the cinema, didn't you read what was written, we were all in the comfort of our own living rooms/bedrooms etc, just twitting at a really bad movie! it was hilarious, fun, and probably the only way to watch such an awful piece of cinematography!
and as it was a bad film, you really don't want to watch it, but obviously with the your concentration span being so low, not being able to read an actual blog post, then probably, you should have gone to the cinema to watch this, and probably you would have liked it..
I did read it
there's no need to be abusive. You're clearly new around here, but it'a not the norm.
abusive?
I wasn't being abusive, i was being slightly sarcastic, there is a difference!
And yes, i'm new... and?
As a rule
...we generally don't wade into each other if someone says something we don't agree with, is all. Be nice.
OMG! Why was this not the lead story on the news?!?!?!!?
Can someone direct me to the 'Intelligent life on planet rock' part of the site please? It used to be here but now seems to have been replaced by 'Antisocial texting nerds with a 2 second attention span'. Has the site been hacked?
surely you meant to write
"not like. u suk."
I am bemused by
the Luddite section of our esteemed and gracious, honourable friends.
Surely the old adage remains: If ya don't get it, don't worry about it.
Get back to yer learnin' and books Prof!
;-)
Sir T
Wherever there is evengelical zeal about something there will always be a reaction. Paul Morely put it well in the FT today: he said nothing is new, MySpace is just a fan club, Facebook is a Youth Club and Twitter is postcards.
Paul Morley?
Would that be the same Paul Morley who, with one Ian Penman, wrote under the name Soaring Performances (or something equally ridiculous) and rendered the old NME completely unreadable? And in doing so, prepared the ground for Q magazine, Mojo, Word... No, I've no idea what my point was either.
Look out for Paul Merely
in the next series of grumpy Old Men
Postcards?
Then Morley has either never used it, or he has but doesn't get it, or he's being disingenuous. Postcards are one-dimensional, one-way, one-to-one communications, while Twitter, like any decent social networking application, is whatever you make it.
TBF to Morley
he was talking about the way that businesses and record companies in particular use it. Here's the piece: http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/be93695c-f95f-11dd-90c1-000077b07658.html.
I have followed quite a few businesses on Twitter and that is how the majority of businesses use it, promoting special offers, discounts, new releases, etc. In much the same way as marketing people in the past have used postcards and tip-ons. I'm not in any way saying that is the way that businesses should use it, but that is how most have used it up until now.
Morley
Then he's talking about the way in which a tiny fraction of people use it, not the vast majority. He's also talking about something that Twitter themselves generally disapprove of and are working to curtail. You can lay the same accusation at e-mail easily enough, and the analogy would ring slightly more true: you can control who sends you an e-mail just as much as you can control who might choose to send you a postcard (i.e. not easily). With Twitter, you choose who is able to reach you. And, presumably, you'd only choose to follow a business if you were genuinely interested in what they had to offer. I don't really see a downside in that sense.
Surreptitiously Lurking
Not all businesses just do promotions. In the US, the ISP/cable co Comcast has famously used it for customer services. One of their guys monitors the stream of tweets for mentions of "Comcast" and investigates complaints. He jumps in on Twitter to talk to the complaining customer.
Tweets are generally public and you don't even need an account to view them, try this (you don't need to sign up to Twitter):
http://search.twitter.com
And this one continuously updates to show you what topics are hot (no account on Twitter needed):
http://www.twitscoop.com
I first noticed the Buffalo air crash on this display. It was an hour or two before any news service had any details.
Trivial
Twitter is trivial
And, for me at least, that's the best thing about it.
It's not like e-mail in that there's no expectation that you should read or respond to everything. It's not like social networking where you have to pretend to be friends with people or "interact" (bleugh!). Like everyone else you just fire off little missives into the void.
I've updated my Twitter while treating it with the disrespect it deserves and in return I've had rather more fun than I expected. What could possibly be wrong with that.
I'll tell ya what's wrong with that!
Absolutely nuthin'...
Twitter can be just like putting a message in a bottle, and then we can choose whether to have a peak inside other people's bottles (I wish I had used another metaphor) or simply let them bob away on the peaceful waves of the ambrosia of life.
innit
Twitter? It's a no from me.
I realise Twitter may well be very good. It may be very addictive. But I've decided that I'm not going to sign up. I just can't see myself fitting it in, and I'd quite like to have less sites bookmarked that I need a log-in for, not more.
A trendsetter writes
I watched the film in question three weeks ago, said "That was really bad", and then discovered Twitter.